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SLUG 13-Nov-2006: Google Earth

By on October 30, 2006 in OpenSource, Technology

Ben Scott announces a presentation on Google Earth by Rob Anderson at the upcoming Seacoast Linux User Group:

  • What : Google Earth
  • Who : Rob Anderson
  • Day : Mon 13 Nov 2006
  • Time : 7:00 PM
  • Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

This November's SLUG meeting will be on Google Earth, with Rob Anderson leading the discussion. We're hoping everyone will get involved for a group learning session.

What is Google Earth?

“It's a globe that sits inside your PC. You point and zoom to anyplace on the planet that you want to explore. Satellite images and local facts zoom into view. Tap into Google search to show local points of interest and facts. Zoom to a specific address to check out an apartment or hotel. View driving directions and even fly along your route.”

— from http://earth.google.com/

Google Earth is free for personal use, and is available for Linux,
Mac OS X, and something called “Windows”.

About SLUG

SLUG is the Seacoast Linux User Group, and is a chapter of GNHLUG, the Greater NH Linux User Group. Rob Anderson is the SLUG coordinator. SLUG meets the second Monday of every month, same time, same place. You can find out more about SLUG and GNHLUG at the http://slug.gnhlug.org/ and http://www.gnhlug.org/ websites.

Meetings take place starting at 7:00 PM. Meetings are open to all. The meeting proper ends around 9ish, but it's not uncommon to find hangers-on there until 10 or later. They take place in Room 301 (the third floor conference room), of Morse Hall, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.

TrixBox 2.0 Beta released

By on October 26, 2006 in LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

LXer reports trixbox 2.0 released. “Trixbox 2.0 beta will be available for download on Wednesday. This release will be Fonality's first big contribution to the trixbox/Asterisk community after the recent Fonality acquisition of trixbox. which certainly caused a stir within the Asterisk community. I spoke with Chris Lyman, CEO of Fonality, to find out more about this major new release of trixbox.”

I've seen TrixBox 1.0 demoed at MonadLUG in June by Tim Lind and it was an impressive piece of software. Looking forward to seeing what improvements are available in the 2.0 version. Tim's doing an Asterisk presentation in December at CentraLUG; perhaps he'll show off 2.0 there.

Oracle Linux v. Red Hat Linux

By on October 26, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

An interesting development. Oracle has announced they will be selling and supporting their own distribution of Red Hat, with base prices lower than those offered by Red Hat. This is perfectly legal, of course, as long as they follow the rules respecting the trademarks and copyrights associated with Red Hat's logos and names. It's already done by CentOS, which offers an “upstream” version of a well-known branded distribution. This is one of the points of Open Source: building on the works of others. The licenses make it clear that while you can build, you can't steal; many licenses require you share back your improvements you make, improving the lot of everyone.

I'll be interested in hearing how this works out. I don't know if it will prove economically feasible to Oracle. I applaud their innovation.

Others don't see it this way. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols decries “Oracle's Red Hat rip-off: “Here's the truth of the matter. Red Hat does a darn good job of supporting its Linux, and charges a fair price for it.” I think that's true, and I think it will be borne out by the marketplace: some big Oracle shops may switch to “Oracle Unbreakable Linux” (hah!), but most shops will be more comfortable staying with the Red Hat vendor they know. And trying to undersell Red Hat on price? Oracle customers are generally not thought to be too price-conscious.

Time will tell. I see it as another endorsement of Linux as a valid platform for mission-critical line-of-business applications. That's a win.

MacBook random shutdown problems due to bad sensor?

By on October 25, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Technology

In MacBook Shutdowns: Case (Finally) Closed?, Harry McCracken documents his trials and tribulations with getting his MacBook fixed. Apple doesn't seem to have been very forthcoming in admitting there was a problem. It appears the problem was with a defective sensor in a heatsink, but initial repairs were replacing the heatsink and the motherboard. Thousands suffered. Rumor mills flourished. Even a class-action lawsuit was started. It's so much better to get ahead of the press in admitting you've discovered a problem than to leave users in the dark. Some people get cranky.

Apple shipped their new MacBookPros this week, with Core 2 Duo processors, right along with Lenovo showing the Core 2 Duo CPUs on their ThinkPads. Which to pick? The “Think Different” company that make beautiful machines, or the tried-and-true-Blue Thinkpads? Sure, both ThinkPads and Macs burst into flames. It's not how you fail that matters, it's how you recover. (Links via Dan Gillmor’s Blog)

Making RSS feeds nicer to view directly

By on October 25, 2006 in Technology

Instead of displaying an ugly and intimidating page of XML when visitors click on the RSS feed icon on your site, provide them with an easy to read page that tells them what RSS is, how to work with it, and display the posts in your RSS feed in readable form. It's relatively easy to do by using a little XSL to style the display of the RSS. In “Working XML: Serve friendlier RSS and Atom feeds, ” Benoit Marchal shows how.

CentraLUG, November 6: Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques

By on October 23, 2006 in Linux, OpenSource, Security, Technology

The monthly meeting of CentraLUG, the Concord/Central NH GNHLUG chapter, happens the first Monday of (most) months on the New Hampshire Institute Campus starting at 7 PM.

Directions and maps are available on the NHTI site. This month, we’ll be meeting in the Library/Learning Center/Bookstore, room 146, marked as “I” on that map. The main meeting starts at 7 PM, and we finish by 9 PM. Open to the public. Tell your friends.

For November’s meeting, Andy Bair will present “Digital Forensic File Carving Techniques.” Data carving techniques are used during digital forensic investigations and existing file carving tools typically produce many false positives. This briefing describes new tools and techniques used by the winning team of the the 2006 File Carving Challenge held at the 6th Annual Digital Forensic Research Workshop (DFRWS). The current briefing is also located here.

In December, Tim Lind of Computerborough will present TrixBox, the Linux distro for running the Asterisk PBX software, formerly known as “Asterisk @ Home.”

January’s meeting falls on the first, so we’ll likely skip the month’s meeting. However, stay tuned for some exciting meetings coming up in 2007! More details on the group and directions to the meeting at http://www.gnhlug.org.

New toy, day two…

By on October 21, 2006 in Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

A little more study on the ThinkPad T40 leads to the great Linux On Laptops web site with some specific advice on the T40 models and a tremendous amount of details on setting up the millions of little devices – mouse buttons, touchpad, IR, video, sound, modem, ethernet, power management, volume control, wireless – whew! – that make a laptop such a pleasure to use.

After setting the hidden non-partition to “Secure” so that no application would attempt to overwrite it, I used an Ubuntu 6.06 LiveCD to resize the WinXPPro NTFS partition down to 18 Gb and set up a boot, root, and swap partition and then install Ubuntu. I set up all the optional repositories that Ubuntu comes with, update the local machine with 200Mb of updates and reboot. Up and running and current. Pretty cool.

Restarting in Windows, WinXP started CHKDSK, since the partition size had changes and it completed and forced a reboot. On the second start, Windows cheerfully reported it had “installed new devices” and needed to restart. What new devices? Hmm. Restarted again. Sheesh.

OOBE as it was meant to be…

By on October 20, 2006 in Apple Macintosh OS X, Linux, Microsoft, OpenSource, Security, Technology

I've been holding off on purchasing a new laptop until IBM/Lenovo had a Linux-compatible ThinkPad T61p with the Merom (“Core 2 Duo”) CPU installed. “End of October” is the latest estimate, but knowing how long Real Soon Now can get to be, I elected to pick up a bench spare laptop Just In Case. My primary machine (“Lucky”) had a dead LCD, fried USB ports and a flaky wireless card. My older beater laptops have about bit the dust. I shopped around the BigBox stores and they were selling consumer junk. I looked at the Apples; they're sweet machines, but the software's still proprietary. If I was going to go for an Apple, I'd want to pick up a monster machine, and the budget doesn't allow that. So, for a while I was stumped. Finally, Laura suggested I look at a lower-model ThinkPad to tide me over.

IBM/Lenovo has a site for refurbished machines. I shopped over a couple of days. Keep an eye on the site, as inventory is changing often. I finally selected a T40, Pentium-M 1.5GHz, 256 Mb RAM (with a free upgrade to 512), 40 Gb HDD, WinXPPro, 1024×768 and CD-RW/DVD for just under USD $700.

With UPS ground shipping, it took less than a week to get here. The Out of Box Experience was perfect. Clean and well-packaged, the machine looked new. Other than a couple scratches on the serial number label, you'd think this thing had been vacuum-packed since it was manufactured in June of 2003. The HDD was a clean install of WinXP, and the “preinstallation” process took about an hour to install XP, forty million patches, IBM custom tools and drivers. A couple onerous registration forms (Yes, I want to register, no, I don't want you to have your “partners” send me mail) and I was up and running. First, a trip to Windows Update. A “new version” of Windows Update (the dreaded Windows Genuine Advantage check — I passed! Whew!) and I was up to date. I was surprised to find that Windows Firewall was not running — I had forgotten is was off by default, and was glad I was within a reasonable safe network as I raised the shields.

Next, a backup before I broke things. Booting onto a Knoppix CD, I followed the same process I used in July to upgrade Laura's hard drive: with the machine off, plug in an external drive and Knoppix, boot, Ctrl-F2 to a root console,

mkdir /media/target
mount /dev/sda1 /media/target
partimage


and in eleven and a half minutes, the 4.5 Gb is backed up. Magick!

I was suprised to see that the recovery partition isn't a partion at all, according to the machine, but unpartitioned space at the end of the drive. That makes it a bit more difficult to make a backup copy for the inevitable hard disk drive failure. IBM's help file tries to explain how this is a feature to keep you from mis-laying a Recovery CD (You'll have to order one from IBM when the hdd fails, it explains. Of course, it will be a little difficult to read the help file on the hdd to discover this once it's failed.) Google, of course, will point you to solutions that can work around pretty much any “feature” the vendor throws in there.

Overall, I'm pretty pleased with the machine, and it will work great as a stopgap between Lucky and the next machine, and at a good price. Now, off to tinker some more…

Isenberg reviews Moyers on The Net@Risk

By on October 19, 2006 in Technology

David Isenberg does a great job of reviewing the Bill Moyer's show, “The Net@Risk”. The show brought out a lot of the problems with mass-ownership of media, the “duopoly” of cable and telephony vendors slowing the US's broadband capabilities (we've slipped below tenth in the world) and how an unbalanced Congress is handing Big Media whatever it wants in 1984-Speak “Net Neutrality” justifications. Congress and Big Media are hurting the US' ability to compete and are harming the Society they are supposed to protect. (Thanks to JOHO for the link.)

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