[KLUG Members] KLUG Meeting Notes for 03/04/2003

magoo members@kalamazoolinux.org
05 Mar 2003 18:29:35 -0500


KLUG Meeting Notes:  Tuesday - March 04, 2003  7:00PM       

I.    PRESENTATION RECAP    
II.   NEXT WEEK'S MEETING INFO   <===  Hylafax !!! 
III.  KLUG MAILING LISTS              
IV.  KLUG NEWS FLASHES 
V.   KLUG CONTACT & MEETING INFO 

Tonight's Meeting Moderator:  KLUG Chairperson Todd Pillars 

I.  PRESENTATION RECAP         
THIS WEEK'S KLUG PRESENTATION:   (23 active KLUG participants) 
***************************************************************** 
Linux for Beginners 
by Todd Pillars 

THE BEGINNER'S MEETINGS ARE HELD the first Tuesday of each 
month.  Linux basics and distribution installs are the 
lessons of these evenings.  If you do want KLUG's FREE help 
installing Linux on your computer at one of these meetings, 

http://kalamazoolinux.org/meetings/installform.html
Contact the KLUG Installmasters for more information: 
installmaster@kalamazoolinux.org  
  - and - 
ORDER YOUR SOFTWARE HERE:  http://kalamazoolinux.org/bsware

Now is the time to get started!  Linux is becoming a mainstay 
of free software, free choice, dependability and power. 

=============================================================== 
THE STANDARD KLUG BEGINNER'S PRESENTATION - LINUX BOOT CAMP!!! 
http://kalamazoolinux.org/presentations/beginner01.html
=============================================================== 

PRESENTATION SUMMARY: 
************************ 
Tonight, Andrew Thompson, the KLUG Install Master had no advance 
requests for help with Open Source GNU Linux installs.  He did 
have several people just show up looking for help!  One person 
had a nice Sony VAIO laptop (with a docking station) and they 
were attempting to install Mandrake v9.0!  Another person came 
in with a desktop that had no CD-ROM and no hard drive to set up 
this computer for use as a floppy-based firewall box.  There 
was a bit of scrambling going on to figure out how to help with 
the Sony laptop install... there was no chance for Andrew to 
check out the specifics on this tricky feat ahead of time.  It 
was not apparent if the install was successful.  The firewall 
box appeared to have been a successful install and configuration. 

While all this was going on there were lots of Linux information 
exchanges going on.  The room was a mixture of people advising 
on the installs, checking out the many laptops connected up to 
the KLUG network hub or blazing off the W.A.P. signal, lots of 
munching on cookies (THANKS JON SMITLEY) and corn chips w/ Chi 
Chi's salsa, and various combinations of mischief and mayhem. 

Despite the winter storm warnings, KLUGites made the trek from 
various remote cities in Southwest Michigan.  Chairperson Todd 
Pillars led the festivities in an informal manner that kept 
everyone at ease and in the mood for GNU Linux OS excitement. 
Dirk was spotted tutoring a student from the Kalamazoo Area 
Math and Science Center (KAMSC) in the basics of Red Hat Linux 
operations using the KLUG LTSP server as a teaching tool.  There 
was a large number of young people in attendance to experience 
the wisdom being expressed by the seasoned Linux operating system 
experts tonight.  

Note: 
As Linux matures as an OS, the educational needs are evolving. 
The Beginner's Meeting format is changing with those needs. 
It is difficult to cover all the basics in one meeting.  Linux 
is not just for CS experts and IT professionals.  The "BASICS" 
meetings are intended for those with limited experience with 
Operating System's or even Personal Computer's.  Your comments 
and questions are welcomed! 

Todd Pillars is the Chairperson of KLUG!  His first PC 
was a 1981 TRS-80 Model 3 2.03Mhz, 16K ram, 5 1/4 floppy 
running TRS-DOS and QBASIC.  In 1997 he started running 
a web development company that hosted web sites with Red 
Hat 5.2.  He was named the Executive Director of Southwest 
Michigan Information Technology Institute in 2003.  SMITI 
provides education and alternatives to proprietary OS's and 
software. They supply technology to small startup companies. 
He has memberships in KLUG, Chamber of Commerce, and GLIMA. 
Admittedly a HUGE Detroit Red Wings fan who loves NASCAR too. 
We look forward to another progressive year of growth for 
KLUG under Todd's leadership. 


II.  NEXT KLUG MEETING - TUESDAY  03/11/2003   
****************************************************************** 
Hylafax; Just the Fax 
by Adam Williams 

Hylafax is a comprehensive faxing solution, coupled with other 
common Open Source packages it can support sending, receiving, 
viewing, and logging of fax communication.  Fax clients are 
supported on a wide variety of platforms.  Come to the meeting 
and see the inner workings of Hylafax, the gotchas, and how to 
avoid them. 

HylaFAX is freely available under copyright in complete source 
form.  It may be used in commercial applications in part or in 
whole without charge.  http://www.hylafax.org/              
              
Adam is a network administrator based in Grand Rapids, but the 
network he deals with is all over Michigan, with a couple of 
hundred workstations, running Linux and other Operating Systems. 
Not only does he deal with domain issues at work, but he is also 
the owner of the domain "whitemice.org". Adam has been a regular 
contributor to technical discussions on our main mailing list, 
both presenting and solving some of the most challenging 
networking and configuration problems. 


III.   K L U G    M A I L I N G    L I S T S 
************************************************************* 
Diversified mailing lists can be found on the KLUG web site. 
http://kalamazoolinux.org/listserv/
Facilitated by - John Bridleman listmaster@kalamazoolinux.org   
Sign up and participate to serve the Open Source community!!! 


IV.   K L U G    N E W S    F L A S H E S ! ! ! 
===================================================================== 
DELL ANNOUNCES THAT FLOPPY DISKS ARE NO LONGER STANDARD EQUIPMENT! 
Chairperson Todd Pillars shared this item with us of recent news 
that involved the evolutionary path of PC storage devices. 
http://karlo.org/archives/000680.php
http://storage.ziffdavis.com/article2/0,3973,869374,00.asp
http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/02/06/Consumers/Delldisks_030206
===================================================================== 
ALMOST TWO TERABYTES OF DISK SPACE IN REGULAR X86 PC! <submitted by TAZ>
"A friend of mine is building a personal server.  He bought 17 of the 
cheapest IDE drives available and used Linux' LVM to get them together."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/01/1947225&mode=thread&tid=137
===================================================================== 
MAKING MYSQL, ODBC & OPENOFFICE 1.0 WORK TOGETHER, PART 2 
OpenOffice.org is more sophisticated and powerful than I realized. 
It can be made to work with various database-management systems, and 
it can do the mailmerge functions required by many SOHO types. 
http://www.linuxworld.com/2003/0217.barr.html
===================================================================== 
DELL CIO SAYS "UNIX IS DEAD" 
Dell's CIO believes that the end of Unix is here, in fact his opening 
slide in a recent presentation was "Unix is dead." Specifically, he 
talked about the savings he claims in moving Dell's Oracle databases 
from Solaris to Red Hat. 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/02/1723214&mode=thread&tid=130
===================================================================== 
FREE SOFTWARE, FREE SOCIETY: SELECTED ESSAYS OF RICHARD M. STALLMAN 
The latest book by Richard Stallman - Free Software, Free Society: 
The Selected Essays of Richard M. Stallman, with an Introduction by 
Lawrence Lessig.  -more-  http://www.gnu.org/doc/book13.html 
===================================================================== 
XFREE86 PROJECT:  THE NEWEST VERSION OF THE MOST POPULAR GRAPHICS 
server for Linux is available.   <submitted by Bruce Atherton> 
http://xfree86.org/4.3.0/RELNOTES.html
===================================================================== 
HOW THE SENDMAIL VULNERABILITY AFFECTS RED HAT LINUX USERS 
A remote attacker can send a carefully crafted email message which 
when processed by sendmail causes arbitrary code to be executed as 
root.  We are told that exploiting this problem is particularly 
difficult, but it is theoretically possible.  Red Hat has produced 
updated Sendmail packages that are patched to protect against this 
vulnerability. 
https://www.redhat.com/support/alerts/sendmail_vulnerability.html
===================================================================== 
HAS GNOME BECOME LAME?  <submitted by Bruce Atherton> 
"Nicholas Petreley (should that be KNicholas KPetreley) of LinuxWorld 
and VarLinux.org has taken his gloves off in the latest article in 
his KDE vs Gnome series. An unabashed KDE supporter, Petreley uses 
some choice fighting words in re-acronymizing GNOME as the Language 
Agnostic Morphable Environment (LAME) Franken-GUI. 
http://www.linuxworld.com/site-stories/2003/0228.petreley.html
===================================================================== 
WHAT HIGH END UNIX FEATURES ARE MISSING FROM LINUX? 
"Sun and other UNIX vendors are always claiming that Linux lacks 
features that their UNIX provides.  I've seen many Slashdot readers 
claim the same thing."  This discussion thread has some interesting 
information to answer this question.  The first response was, THE 
PRICE! 
http://ask.slashdot.org/askslashdot/03/03/03/1818252.shtml?tid=190
&tid=106 
===================================================================== 
FILM GIMP PROJECT RENAMED TO CINEPAINT 
"To avoid confusion with the GIMP, the Film Gimp project has renamed 
itself to CinePaint. The project is essentially a legitimate fork of 
GIMP, and is focused on image manipulations for moving pictures." 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/03/02/2349258&mode=thread&
tid=152&tid=97&tid=92 
===================================================================== 
A LINUX NEWS PORTAL HAS LOTS OF LINUX INFORMATION 
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/
A RED HAT LINUX V8.0 REVIEW PACKED WITH FACTS FROM 11/2002! 
XP killer? RedHat 8.0 Personal Review 
http://www.linuxlinks.com/portal/news/staticpages/index.php?
page=20021029174517236 
===================================================================== 
RED HAT VERSION 8.1 RUMORED TO HAVE AN APRIL RELEASE PLANNED 
This rumor was printed in the February 10, 2003 InfoWorld (p. 17) 
===================================================================== 
KLUG NEEDS VOLUNTEERS TO FILL SEVERAL VACANT POSITIONS 
Nutrimaster and Education Director volunteer slots are still 
vacant.  We need additional volunteers to act as the "Meeting 
Firewall" to handle Chamber access control and security issues. 
The Chamber has asked us to safeguard their assets as KLUG 
members come and go from the meeting room each Tuesday night. 
Bob and Zac need help with this function which requires that 
you get to the meetings early and see that the everything is 
locked up as the last person leaves.  This means being at the 
Chamber at 6:30pm and hanging around until 10:00pm. We have 
other volunteer positions available and many of these duties 
could be shared if you have an interest.  GET INVOLVED IN KLUG! 
Volunteers are needed for Beginner's Nights and Installfests. 
Please contact installmaster@kalamazoolinux.org for more details. 
See http://kalamazoolinux.org/organize for position descriptions. 
===================================================================== 
********* - ********* - ********* - ********* - ********* - *********  
KLUG NEEDS SPEAKERS FOR THE WEEKLY LINUX RELATED PRESENTATIONS! 
********* - ********* - ********* - ********* - ********* - *********  
Contact Adam if you can give a presentation on any area of Linux 
related subject or application.  He would also like to hear your 
suggestions for topics and possible speaker referrals.  Do you 
know anyone who is using Linux in Southwest Michigan and might 
be willing to share their Linux expertise by making a technical 
presentation?  Professional, individual, or commercial speakers 
on Linux accepted.  Contact programdirector@kalamazoolinux.org 
with your referrals and ideas.  See the meeting schedule for open 
dates.   http://www.kalamazoolinux.org/meetings/schedule.php3
=====================================================================


V.   K L U G    C O N T A C T   &   M E E T I N G    I N F O  
************************************************************* 
KLUG WEB SITE  http://kalamazoolinux.org

MEMBERS AND GUESTS - COME JOIN US FOR A MEETING!!! 
http://kalamazoolinux.org/meetings           
WE MEET WEEKLY, EACH TUESDAY AT 7:00PM.      
                                             
Our meeting site is the Kalamazoo Chamber    
of Commerce office building downtown.          
346 W. Michigan Ave. - Kalamazoo, MI  49007 
http://kazoolug.org/meetings/maps.php3   <=== MAP! 

CONTACT INFORMATION: 
Kalamazoo Linux Users Group, Inc. 
6749 South Westnedge Avenue 
Suite K-288 
Portage  MI 49002 
e-mail address: chair@kalamazoolinux.org


                         Copyright 2003                 
                 Kalamazoo Linux Users Group, Inc. 
  >><< send corrections, additions, flames to the KLUG scribe >><< 
                          Ralph Worick 
                recordingsecretary@kalamazoolinux.org
                               = or = 
                 KLUG Meeting Notes Assistant Editor 
                          Bruce Atherton 
                    Taz <htgage3@chartermi.net> 

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