Tag Archives | Linux

DLSLUG 1-March-2007: Bill Stearns on “50 Ways to Run Your Programs”

Fourteen attendees managed to find the monthly meeting of the Dartmouth – Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, despite being held one floor up from the regular meeting room. (A reminder from yours truly that you can save yourself a trip down and up the stairs if you just Read The Fine Announcement Bill McGonigle prepares each month. I needed the exercise anyway.)

Bill Stearns presented “50 Ways to Run Your Programs,” He had tremendous handouts: a vinyl 3-ring notebook binder with 61 pages. He asked us all to skim the materials and pick out the couple of techniques we wanted to drill down into. He covered in some depth (though each could get its own book): passing commands through ssh, combining screen with ssh, using wget as part of a pipe, how wget can work with caching, using tee to redirect output through the pipe as well as to a file simultaneously, the precedence of && in sequencing commands on the command line, some of the implications of subshells and environment variables, gotchas with cron, using eval and netcat. Bill is knowledgeable and rolled well with the punches, like his new HP widescreen battleship of a laptop refusing to run X on the projector. (Bill had an aside about the joys of Open Source providing the means of fixing some bad interrupt logic in the BIOs with a kernel switch – yay, Open Source!) Bill hardly broke a sweat despite the attendance of Professor McIlroy, who is credited with having invented the pipes and filters architecture of Unix. A good time was had by all, with lots of time for questions (from novices “What does that do?” to some pretty advanced questions on piping and subshells and so forth.)

Next meeting is 5 April when Todd Underwood will present ZFS. Thanks to Bill McGonigle for organizing the meeting, Bill Stearns for the great presentation, and all for participating.

DLSLUG, March 1st 2007: 50 Ways to Run Your Programs

Bill McGonigle announces the March meeting of the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, featuring “50 Ways to Run Your Programs” presented by Bill Stearns. Sounds like a great meeting!

“At this meeting Bill will explore ways to change how programs run. He will cover ways to change a program’s priority, where it runs, when it runs, debug new and running applications, and much more. Attendees are welcome, and encouraged, to bring their own laptops and try new techniques that will help them tap the power of a Linux environment.”

“William Stearns is a network security researcher and instructor for the SANS Institute, teaching the Linux System Administration and Perimeter Security tracks. In his spare time he maintains a major antispam blacklist and assists the technical community as a volunteer incident handler for the Internet Storm Center. His articles and tools can be found in SysAdmin magazine, online journals, and at http://www.stearns.org.”

Seacoast Linux User Group tonight: Rob Anderson on MP3

What : MP3 file handling under Linux
Who : Robert E. Anderson
Day : Mon 12 Feb 2007
Time : 7:00 PM
Where: Room 301, Morse Hall, UNH, Durham, NH

This month’s meeting of the Seacoast Linux User Group will feature Robert E. Anderson talking about MP3 file handling under Linux. Talk to include:

  • MP3 vs OggVorbis
  • Ripping a CD collection using KAudioCreator.
  • Playlist formats PLP vs M3U
  • ID3 tags
  • udev and autofs
  • Amarok
  • VFAT and special characters
  • rsync

Further details can be found at http://slug.gnhlug.org/slug/Members/rea/SLUG/slug-meetings/mp3-file-handling-under-linux/

For directions and related web links visit the http://slug.gnhlug.org website

Hosstraders no more

Color horse logo of HosstradersSad news from the organizers of the spring and fall Hosstraders ham radio festival: they have chosen to end the event. No more Hosstraders. I very much enjoyed the last four or five I attended. The GNHLUG has manned a booth there for quite some time, and it was a great opportunity to do some outreach to like-minded technically adept folks. We gave away a lot of Linux distributions, sold off personal surplus equipment and picked up lots of neat gadgets. I’ll miss Hosstraders. USD 1.3 million was raised for Shriner’s Children Burn Centers. GNHLUG leader maddog expresses his appreciation here.

Linspire.com – Linspire Letter

In this week’s Linspire.com – Linspire Letter, Linspire announces a partnership with Canonical, the commercial supporters of Ubuntu. Linspire/Freespire plans to move their foundation distribution from Debian to Ubuntu, as MEPIS had announced some time ago. Ubuntu, in turn, plans to include CNR (“Click’N Run”) as an additional means of installing software – some free, some commercial, like codecs – into later versions of Ubuntu. This seems like a direct response to Eric S. Raymond’s call for better interoperability with proprietary formats for Linux.

No doubt, “Free as in Freedom” purists will see this as troubling. Pragmatic folks who just want to play their MP3s on Linux may welcome it. Whether this is the move that opens Linux to widespread adoption or destroys the underpinnings of Open Source… only time will tell.

MonadLUG notes: 8-Feb-2007: uniq and Joomla!

Charlie Farinella called the meeting to order promptly at 7 PM and cracked his whip to stick to his streamlined agenda. Brief announcements (“find GNHLUG events on www.gnhlug.org”) were followed by Ray Côté’s presentation of uniq. Ray explained the function and then introduced an increasingly complex set of examples, one building on another to show how uniq could remove duplicate lines from a sorted file, display various counts of duplicates and so forth.

Guy Pardoe was the main presenter. After the requisite wrestling with the projector, Guy talked about Joomla! Guy had hoped to be showing version 1.5, but it is still in early beta (beta 1 with beta 2 due rsn), so he didn’t feel it was ready to talk about for production sites. Guy explained when he volunteered for the presentation he thought 1.5 would be available, and promised to return when 1.5 was available and he had some experience in using it for production work. He briefly reviewed Barrie North’s presentation from DLSLUG last year (registration required) (and our notes from that meeting). Guy then showed us the Joomla! 1.0 correction: 1.5 install he had done that day, highlighting the basic features of the CMS and the ease of use of the administrative interface. It appeared to be a very open and accessible system. Templates and CSS files could be edited from within the interface and they appeared to be XHTML and CSS2 compliant.

A general Q&A followed. General concerns on the security of the core framework. Concern about the timeliness of the 1.5 release. General discussion of what CMS could do and what the target market was.

After the main presentation, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Maddog announced that he and Bill Sconce had met with faculty at the New Hampshire Technical Institute and that a plan to hold a series of MythTV Installfests was proposed (see the -org list for details).

Answering another question that has come up on the discusssion list, I came across this post while I was looking for Barrie’s presentation. While he is advocating for Joomla!, of course, he may be pointing out that WordPress would meet some peoples needs as well.

Why you want to use Joomla! instead of WordPress

Thirteen attendees were at the meeting. Thanks to Charlie for running the meeting, Ray and Guy for presenting, Ken and the Monadnock SAU for providing the facilities, and to maddog and all attendees for participating!

What we’re doing with Fedora Seven

Arbitrary division between Core and Extras. Decision to move everything into one build system, one compose system, one distribution. Many reasons: spread out the load, many eyes -> shallow bugs. If anyone can create a “spin” of Fedora. Red Hat does a good job of engineering the core, the build, the methodology. By enabling Fedora to be accessible to many, specialists can turn Fedora to their uses.

1. Getting source code control merged.
2. Getting packaging standards up-to-date. For example, SysVInit, conditional builds depend on files that haven’t existed forever.
3. Adding new features to the build systems. Currently using Plague. (ref. Jessie’s talk this morning)
4. Punji – “anyone can compose a Fedora distribution”

New feature: simple ways to customize a distribution. Punji only lets you pick packages. This is more parameters: ex. start some services by default. Changing the default desktop. Could be done now with a Kickstart file, but that’s an ugly post-build solution.

Fedora Update System: Luke Mecken (?) is working on this. In-house, developer pushes a fix, with a short description, what bugs are fixed, etc. Depends on internal build system at Red Hat. Hope to target Fedora, Extras, and EPEL (Extra Products for Enterprise Linux).

User-oriented features: wireless support. Next-gen wireless support “DeviceScape.” (whole list on the wiki). Nuevo device support. nVidia support a licensing issue – only 2-D freely distributable. Nuevo project is reverse-engineering 3-D support.

Fast-user switching, he says “about time, Windows has had this for years.”

Lots of little fixes: noisy apps the wake up the kernel 10 times a second, startup stuff that times out waiting for hardware you don’t have. A “tickless” kernel. R&R 1.2: from the X.org community. Online detection of device installation and removal, rotation and resizing.

KVM virtualization, which Jeremy talks about later.

Q&A: how about a Migration Wizard that notices that you’ve got FireFox and Thunderbird on your NTFS partition and offers to migrate the settings to Linux? (A: Hmm. NTFS may be an issue, but the code is out there.) How about full disk encryption for laptops (partial answer: no, portions only: home, swap, data, using ecryptfs.) Q: Version numbers: will we ever see 10?

Project Smolt: instrumenting what applications are used. Very sensitive to privacy issues. The LHCP is a larger-scoped project for building databases of hardware compatibility.

SysVInit replacement: there’s a horse race with several competitors. Opinions about what’s what appear to be all over the map. A replacement has to be compatible, support thrd-party packages and broken init scripts, and maintain LSB compatibility. Q whether LSB compatibility is met for init scripts and discussions on their vagueness.

How close is the Core-Extra merge? In process, targetted for Test 2.

Q: on the build system, which dissolved into indecipherable acronyms.

Tag: fedoraboston2007

SELinux Modules

Dan Walsh of Red Hat talks about SETroubleshooter that translates the gobbledegook error messages from SELinux and better explain what the issues are. Tool audit2allow generates the SELinux macro language (audit2allow’s been around for a while). audit2allwo -M builds a module and prompts the user the commands needed to incorporate it: a te file for type enforcement, a pp ‘policy package’ that contains the policy and a compiler that generates a .mod file.

Package selinux-policy-devel provides the tools to generate a new policy that can confine an application . Policygentool takes a ModuleNane and an Executable as parameters. Dan used the smart card daemon as an example. He used the tool and generated a basic template, started the service, viewed the logs, added in the policies needed to support the behaviors of the tool and re-generated the module. “Lather, rinse, repeat.”

There’s a package on the FC6 called policycoreutils-gui which I think is called system-configure-selinux (Dan didn’t have it installed) that will let you do much of this without working from the command windows.

Tag: fudconboston2007

Mugshot

Bryan Clark shows how Mugshot is linked to digg and and his blog and picasa and flickr and google video and yahoo video and… whew! Live client for Linux and Windows. See what your friends are doing, posting, reading, playing music. Mugshot can be the overarching links of IM, email, digg, del.icio.us and more. With a centralized server, you could open a VM on a foreign machine and have it bring down your web presence environment. Primarily they are working on client. Server is open sourced, but not well documented. They are supporting 5000 users on two boxes and believe they can scale. Sarbannes-Oxley and other regs would require a lot of corporate users to work on something inside their firewall or with auditing. Will be interesting to see how it grows.

Tag: fudconboston2007

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