Beta-testing the “Flight 5” beta of “Dapper Drake” (gotta love the code names!) of Kubuntu (the KDE variant of Ubuntu) and I wanted to print some business cards using the awesome glabels program. My printer is an HP OfficeJet d145 using the optional HP jetDirect 200m network print server. While the distro does support and recognize the JetDirect standard, my particular printer model isn’t on the supplied (and extensive!) printer list. A quick Google points to the printer definition file at LinuxPrinting.org. Start the print dialogs with System. Administration, Printing off the menu, specify the JetDirect interface and IP address, and pick “Install” to specify the printer model. A couple more clicks and a test page prints successfully. Awesome! Hi-res color printing, support for the network interface, the duplexer and all. How hard can it be?
Archive | OpenSource
Open Source means that users have the freedom to see how software works, adapt it for the own needs, fix bugs and limitations and contribute back to the community.
Dabo Runtime Engine For Windows 0.6.2 released
Ed Leafe announced today: “The Dabo Runtime Engine for Windows is a self-contained environment that allows you to run Dabo on Windows without having to first install all of the requirements. It comes with its own version of Python 2.4.2, wxPython 2.6.3.0, MySQLdb 1.2.0, kinterbasdb 3.2.0a1, ReportLab v.2463, and several other modules used in Dabo.”
Check out dabo at http://www.dabodev.com. Dabo is a rich-client application framework for data-centric applications. Written in Python, it provides multiple database support, WinTel, MacOSX, Linux front ends, and some remarkable capabilities. While the entire dabo projects is at version 0.6.2, Ed says that the visual tools are around 0.5 while the actual framework is 1.0+.
CentralLUG, 3 April 2006: MS Office Docs to PDF
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, marked as “I” on this map. Further directions and maps are available on the NHTI site at http://www.nhti.edu. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
This month’s meeting will feature David Berube of http://www.berubeconsulting.com presenting techniques to extract content from MS Office documents. From David:
“Microsoft Office documents are ubiquitous. However, the Microsoft Office suite is not available for all platforms and comes with a prohibitive cost attached to it. While a variety of open source readers are available to read the MS Office suite formats, you can‰t always count on the user having installed one these readers. On the other hand, PDF viewers are common, freely available, and have a much smaller footprint than an office suite. This presentation will show you how to programatically convert Word and Excel documents into PDF, using open source tools and PHP.”
More details at about the group are available at http://www.gnhlug.org.
Should be a great presentation. Hope to see you there!
How Important Is Certification?
SysAdmin magazine asks “How Important Is Certification?.” I’ve pushed certification for years and think that certification is what you make of it: a marketing move, a means of self-validation, a way of determining a basic knowledge level, an indication of a self-starter. Paper Tigers abound in all fields. Certification is no panacea. But it’s a start. Eventually, a professional certification and licensing process like that for Engineers is inevitable, providing a balance of both legal protection and legal liability.
Fedora Core 5 isos available – grab the BitTorrent while it flows!
Slashdot post: Fedora Core 5 Available. Jan Slupski writes “New release day today. Fedora Core 5 CD images are now available for download (i386, ppc, x86_64) on the ftp servers or via the torrent page.” Linclips also has a short screencast on some of the default functionality.”
Cranked up Azureus to download and share the ISOs for the FC5 DVD and 5-CD set(!) (plus rescue CD). If you like the Red Hat Way and like messing with some of the more experimental stuff out there, Fedora will show you what to expect in Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the next version. For workstations, I’m using a mix of Fedora and Ubuntu. For servers, I set clients up with one of the RHEL flavors. In-house, we’re pinching pennies with Fedora and CentOS.
IE and FireFox both the least secure. And the most.
Computerworld News reports After flap, Symantec adjusts browser bug count. “A report issued today by Symantec Corp. features two different ways of counting browser bugs: one that finds IE has the most vulnerabilities, another that indicates Firefox is the bug-leader.”
So, there! That ought to settle the issue once and for all. Lies, damned lies, statistics and bug counts.
OpenOffice.org lagging behind MSOffice?
Linux-Watch.com asks: “Is OpenOffice really ten years behind MS Office?” A better question might be if that’s a bad thing. The 2nd edition of “Hacker’s Guide to Word for Windows” printed in 1995 claims to cover WinWord 6. How many more features did we really need? Toolbars that transmogrified into palettes? Menus that went 3-D when the mouse was over them? The words came out the same.
I don’t agree that OpenOffice.org is “ten years behind.” I still can’t get it to run the Melissa virus. But I’m not sure “ten years behind” or even better “ten years on a different path” is a bad thing.
Ed Leafe: State of the Dabo presentation at PyCon video online
Over at leafe.com, Ed Leafe posts:
“Last week at PyCon I gave a session on The State of Dabo, and we recorded it with a video camera located in the back of the room. So yeah, we have a recording, but both the video and audio are less than optimal. Still, if you’d like to see it, I’m making the video available.”
“Due to the large file size, I won’t be serving it directly from my servers. I’ve created BitTorrent files that will allow everyone to share the bandwidth and make things go much more smoothly. The session is broken up into 3 parts, so here are the URLs for each of the torrents:”
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1580&name=pycon2006-dabo1.mov.torrent
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1581&name=pycon2006-dabo2.mov.torrent
http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1582&name=pycon2006-dabo3.mov.torrent
“If you’re not familiar with the way that BitTorrent works, keep in mind that once you have the complete file, *don’t* close your torrent client. Instead, leave it running, which will help speed up downloading for others. The more people connected to these torrents,
the faster everyone gets a copy!”
I’ll be hosting a couple of BitTorrent seeds here over the weekend, so grab it while you can!
MonadLUG 9 March: Bill Stearns and ssh
Guy Pardoe, MonadLUG Coordinator, announces their March 9th meeting:
The next meeting of the Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) will be Thursday, March 9th, 7:00pm, at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough.
SSH Operations and Techniques – Bill Stearns
SSH is a program to log into another computer over a network, to execute commands in a remote machine, and to move files from one machine to another. It provides strong authentication and secure communications over insecure channels. It is a replacement for rlogin, rsh, rcp, and rdist. It protects a network from attacks such as IP spoofing, IP source routing, and DNS spoofing.
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Directions: The SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools office is directly behind the South Meadow School. From downtown Peterborough, travel north on route 202 approximately 2 & 1/2 miles. Look for a white sign on the left “SAU 1 Superintendant of Schools Office.” The entrance is on the left, just before South Meadow school, and across the street from Sims Press. Follow the drive up towards dumpsters where there is ample parking. Come down the stairs to the set of doors on your right. Enter thru double set of doors and turn left…straight into the board room.
Or check the link to Google maps to see our location:
http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/OurChapters#monadlug
Monday March 6th: CentraLUG meeting: Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP)
The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central New Hampshire chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux Users Group, occurs on the first Monday of each month on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM. This month, we’ll be meeting in Room 146 of the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, http://www.nhti.net/nhtimap.pdf , marked as “I” on that map. Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.
This month’s meeting will feature Steve Amsden, Network Administrator for the Merrimack Valley School District, showing off LTSP, the Linux Terminal Server Project. From Steve:
“LTSP is an add-on package for Linux that allows you to connect lots of low-powered thin client terminals to a Linux server. Applications typically run on the server, and accept input and display their output on the thin client display. The power and flexibility of this platform have far reaching implications, particularly for K12 school districts who have been educated and brave enough to seek other solutions than the cost of systems and applications software. But more specifically, being locked into a treadmill of constant upgrades, licensing problems, and unsupportable client-server nework environments that have been the Achille’s heel of technology education. Merrimack Valley School District has five LTSP server environments in various states of implementation, and
uses e-Smith Linux server for gateway, DHCP, content filtering, firewall, and Windows 2000 emulation using SAMBA. Exeter School District, as well as Salem, are too using combinations of e-Smith and LTSP. Though LTSP has made in-roads into the schools, it will be some time before the full impact is realized, and others convinced that there is a better way than the Microsoft Way.”
Should be an awesome presentation! Hope to see you there!