Tag Archives | Linux

CentraLUG: 5 December: James Fogg on Windows-Linux Interoperability

By Ted Roche on November 29, 2005 in LAMP, Microsoft, OpenSource, Technology

Please note the change in location: we will be meeting in Little Hall Room 230, a lab with computers. On the NHTI map located at http://www.nhti.edu/welcome/nhtimap.pdf (warning: 1 Mb+ PDF), the building is marked “K”

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. Open to the public. Free admission. Tell your friends.

This month’s meeting will feature James Fogg discussing Windows-Linux interoperability. James Fogg is a principal with JDFogg Technology Consulting, where he is a network engineer specializing in delivering IT, Telecommunications and Computer Services, Systems, Sales and Consulting to the Fortune 500.

Many companies now operate mixed environments and managers expect their technical staff to be able to “make it work.” James will provide some ideas on how to do it. He’ll be covering interoperability methods between Microsoft Windows products and Linux/Unix systems. File Sharing, Application Sharing, network Services (DNS, DHCP, NTP, etc.), Mail and Printing. Also included will be the basics of Linux, Unix and Active Directory authentication, authorization and auditing.

I was pleased to learn that in the most recent editions of Microsoft’s Services for Unix, Microsoft is including an NFS client. SFU is a downloadable component for the currently supported versions of Windows and Microsoft has committed to including some of the functionality future OS releases. Interoperability is Good. SFU is one of several things James plans to cover.

Hope to see you there!

Doc: Saving the Net

By Ted Roche on November 16, 2005 in Technology

Doc’s at it again. Years ago, he pointed out that the ClueTrain was leaving the station, this time he posts a call to arms in Saving the Net. Required Reading.

“I’ve spent much of the last two weeks writing an essay that just went up at Linux Journal: Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes. It’s probably the longest post I’ve ever put up on the Web. It’s certainly the most important. And not just to me.”

Read the (both now-Internet-Archived) entire post-about-the-post here: Saving the Net from the pipeholders.

DLSLUG/GNHLUG Quarterly Meeting, 3 Nov 2005

By Ted Roche on November 7, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

What a great meeting last week! Forty-three attendees made this the most attended Greater New Hampshire Linux User Groupquarterly meeting of the year.

Thanks to Doug McIlroy for a fascinating presentation on his memories of growing up with the computer industry. Doug ran the department at Bell Labs where Kernighan and Ritchie came up with C, studied at MIT with WhirlWind, and had many fascinating adventures along the way. Doug put on a great show featuring significant and memorable milestones and wonderful anecdotes. Several people took notes, audio and video recordings. We hope to see something on the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee LUG site soon!

Thanks also to Bill McGonigle for arranging and emceeing the meeting. Bill started with the usual announcements about the group, thanking PTR/Addison Wesley for providing some books to raffle as well as paying for the delicious refreshments. Bill had been contacted by a survey firm claiming to be looking for cases of Linux cost of ownership situations other than those that have been popularly reported. Bill expressed some scepticism on the legitimacy of this information and asked to contact him if you want to look into it. A raffle after Doug’s presentation gave away a couple of Addison-Wesley books and some RedHat promotional DVDs.

Bill Stearns announced the results of the project to bring some networking gear to Pass Christian schools following Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of their schools, and pointed to a link with pictures. Great job, Bill!

At the end, I spoke for a few minutes on the on-going effort to gather feedback for the development of by-laws and the registration of GNHLUG as a non-profit organization. Reception was generally positive. Several attendees offered to send along by-laws for their organizations, so we can examine what others have done.

Finally, we announced the next quarterly meeting. We’ll be joining with the New Hampshire Chapters of the ACM and IEEE for a presentation by Rik van Riel showing off spamikaze, an automated spam block system. The meeting will take place at Robert Frost Hall in the Walker Auditorium at Southern New Hampshire University. Note the unusual time: the main presentation is 5 Pm to 6 Pm, to allow evening graduate school students to attend. Hope to see you there! Thanks to all who attended!

PySIG last Thursday: Jython

By Ted Roche on October 29, 2005 in OpenSource, Python, Technology

The Python Special Interest Group (http://www.pysig.org), a chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group (http://www.gnhlug.org) had it’s monthly meeting last Thursday at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester, NH.

Kent Johnson put on a very good presentation and demonstration of Jython, complete with working demos, sample code and handouts. Everyone from novice to journeyman practitioner walked away with a better appreciation of what Jython is (simplifying, a Python interpreter/runtime written in Java) and what it isn’t, when to use it (working in a Java environment or wanting to use Java-based library functions). Great job, Kent! I’ve posted some notes from the meeting as well as Kent’s notes to the PySIG wiki at http://www.pysig.org/pywiki/PyNotes20051027.

Nearly a dozen people attended at the Amoskeag Business Incubator (thanks to them for the free space and projector), including new attendees brought in by Bill Sconce’s recent appearance at the ACM/IEEE seminar series and from my posts to the SwaNH lists. See, PR works!

Shipping no WINE before it’s time, twelve years to beta

By Ted Roche on October 22, 2005 in FoxPro, OpenSource, Technology

OSNews notes After 12 Years of Work, WINE is Going Beta. “After roughly 12 years of work, the Wine Project is about to take its widely used Windows translation layer to a place it has not been in all that time: beta. Wine Project leader Alexandre Julliard, who has worked on the software nearly since its beginning in 1993 and maintained it since 1994, said in an interview yesterday that the beta release is “a matter of days away.” He has since updated that forecast and said it would be released on Tuesday, October 25th.”

A remarkable platform, WINE Is Not an Emulator, but rather a thin layer that maps Win32 calls to matching Linux calls, running some applications even faster than on their native OS. Note that Visual FoxPro is a popular item in the Application Database, named to the Top 10 Silver List.

Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released

By Ted Roche on October 20, 2005 in OpenSource, Technology

OSNews notes Ubuntu 5.10 Server Released. “The Ubuntu team is proud to announce Ubuntu 5.10 Server, the first release of Ubuntu designed especially for server environments. Like the standard desktop Ubuntu, it occupies a single CD. However, it is distinguished by the following features: Includes server-oriented kernels with out-of-the-box automatic support for multiprocessor systems; Includes a wide variety of popular server applications such as apache, mysql, postgresql, php, zope, openldap, bind, samba, and more.” Visit the OSNews site for links to download the CD image for PowerPC, i386 and AMD64.

Ubuntu has taken the world by storm, recently highlighted as the Desktop OS of choice in Linux Journal poll. I’ve been impressed with the Debian-based distribution. It will be interesting to see what innovations they bring to their server version.

Nashua GNHLUG meeting next Thursday: OpenVPN

By Ted Roche on October 15, 2005 in OpenSource, Security, Technology

The Nashua chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the third Thursday of each month at Martha’s Exchange, Main Street Nashua. Dinner starts at 6 PM (pay for your own), the presentation starts upstairs at 7:30.

This months meeting on the 20th of October will have Ken D’Ambrosio showing OpenVPN, an open source solution to remote secure access to a network. OpenVPN runs on Windows, Linux, *BSD, OS X and Solaris. From their web page:

“OpenVPN implements OSI layer 2 or 3 secure network extension using the industry standard SSL/TLS protocol, supports flexible client authentication methods based on certificates, smart cards, and/or 2-factor authentication, and allows user or group-specific access control policies using firewall rules applied to the VPN virtual interface. OpenVPN is not a web application proxy and does not operate through a web browser.”

Sounds like a meeting not to miss!

Ubuntu 5.10 released!

By Ted Roche on October 14, 2005 in LAMP, OpenSource

Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (that’s a Year-Month versioning scheme) code-named “Breezy Badger” has been released. Join the BitTorrents for a speedy download. Versions for i386, AMD64, PowerPC both live and install are available. Key features include a recent kernel (2.6.12.6), GNOME, Xorg, improved drivers and hardware compatibility and beta 2 of OpenOffice.org 2.0. Also included is a server configuration with support for LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project), NFS support and more. Check it out!

MonadLUG tonight: The Open CD

By Ted Roche on October 13, 2005 in OpenSource

Tonight at the MonadLUG meeting, I will present “The Open CD” a CD to share with family and friends. It has Windows-readable and -runnable binaries including FireFox, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, 7-Zip, Audacity, Battle for Wesnoth, Gaim, Celestia, GIMP, Notepad2, PDFCreator, Really Slick Screensaveers, NVU, Sokoban and TuxPaint. It also includes the texts “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” and “Open Sources.” If booted, the CD runs a LiveCD version of Ubuntu. It’s a powerful tool to convince family, friends, clients and perfect strangers to try out F/OSS.

Download your copy from http://www.theopencd.org/ or come to the MonadLUG meeting tonight where I will have copies to give away.

The Monadnock Linux User Group (MonadLUG) meets the second Thursday or each month at 7:00pm at the SAU 1 Superintendent’s Office behind South Meadow School in Peterborough, New Hampshire. Details, directions and lots more information are available at the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group web site.

PySIG in two weeks: Jython

By Ted Roche on October 13, 2005 in OpenSource, Python

The Python Special Interest Group (“PySIG”) of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User Group meets the fourth Thursday of each month at the Amoskeag Business Incubator in Manchester at 7 PM.

This month, the meeting will take place on Thursday, 27 October 2005 and will feature a presentation on Jython by KentJohnson.

“Kent is soliciting suggestions for specific topics (on the PySIG mailing list). In the meantime here’s a synopsis about Jython in the large from the project’s home page: http://www.jython.org/docs/whatis.html. Jython should be of interest to anyone who uses or wants to know about either Python or Java. I particularly like the “typically 2-10X shorter” part, having worked on Java projects in a former life…” — Bill Sconce, PySIG coordinator

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