Previous Meetings Saturday, November 15, 2003   Trevor did a splendid job at the meeting the other night. He showed how to add a new hard drive to an existing system giving your computer room to breathe. He suggested using another Linux system to do the partitioning, formatting and testing and then installing it into the proper system in the case of a server to avoid unnecessary downtime. If it's not going unto a server, it may be unnecessary to do this. In his example, the first drive was full and he needed to to expand the /home directory by moving it to the new drive. Here were the steps: 1. Hook up hard drive physically to test system taking note to change master/slave selection or using cable select. 2. Start up test system and note where Linux sees it (hdb,hdc,sdb, etc.) by watching the bootup messages or running this command after bootup: # dmesg | less 3. Use fdisk or cfdisk (which is easier) and remove the windows partition that is usually already on the drive. Create a Linux partition and be sure to write it to the partition table before exiting. 4. Format the drive using mke2fs or the appropriate mkfs.filesystem command if using a non-ext2/3 filesystem. On modern drives, it's highly encouraged to use a journaling filesystem (ext3, reiserfs, xfs, jfs) because of the large amount of time a fsck can take if a power outage or computer failure occurs. 5. Mount the drive using the mount command. Create some files just to make sure the drive works using touch. Delete the files after using rm. # mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /mnt # df # cd /mnt # touch testfile1 testfile2 testfile3 # ls # rm testfile1 testfile2 testfile3 6. Power down the test system and transfer the hard drive to the server/production system. # shutdown -h now 7. Power up the server system noting that the hard drive is detected properly and where (it may be in a different location as before and therefore have a different drive designation). 8. Create a new directory at the root (/) level (though it could be anyhere) and call it /newhome. Mount the new drive here. # mkdir /newhome # mount -t ext3 /dev/hdb1 /newhome 9. Copy the files from the present /home to the new drive using cp with the flags for recursive copying and retaining permissions (-R or -r and -p) and make sure the files are there. # cp -Rp /home/* /newhome 10. Make room for your new home directory by changing the name of the present home directory. # mv /home /oldhome 11. Umount the new drive and remount it again, this time at /home. # umount /newhome # mount -t ext3 /dev/hda1 /home 12. Check that it's there using df and that the files are there. 13. Modify /etc/fstab adding the new mounting information and reboot to make sure it works. Tip: Always backup your existing /etc/fstab file before continuing like this: # cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak 14. Once you're confident all the home data is there, you can delete the old home directory and the files in it. # rm -r /oldhome/ 15. Enjoy your new drive! posted by Jason 8:36 AM Monday, July 14, 2003   On July 10, we had a great meeting comparing three easy installations of Linux that are perfect for those beginning their use of Linux. Harry "Buster" Ellis, led with an introductory slideshow talking about the different ways to install Linux. You can view it online here. Trevor Merrit started the demo portion of the meeting with his install of JAMD, a new Red Hat-based distribution. Trevor showed the modified Red Hat installer and explained that it took the longest of the three distros to install, both because it is a large install (requiring 1.7 MB minimum) and because it was being installed on a slower Pentium II 400 Mhz with 128 MB of RAM. JAMD can be freely downloaded as a single ISO. Once copying of files had begun, Trevor turned the meeting over to Clint Gilders. The developer has designed a new website and there is great user support in the forums. Clint started his presentation of Lycoris, which started its days as Redmond Linux, another great distro. Clint showed that while Lycoris asked more questions than JAMD did, it didn't have any problems detecting the hardware. He did point out the one potential snafu -- that Lycoris appears to hang near the end of the install, but is really just preparing to reboot to finish. Clint explained that there is an older stable version of Lycoris Desktop/LX (boxed with manual) available commercially for $30 US. There is a deluxe version available for developers that includes source code and development libraries and applications for $40 US. Both include 60 days of email support. But you can download a newer version (though beta) for free from the Lycoris Community website or LinuxISO.org. Following the break, Harry asked a visitor to perform the Lindows install. Though more expensive than many other Linux distros at $50 US for the base distribution plus $50 US per year, Lindows is the fastest install of the three installs and probably the fastest of any Linux distro. It's also the most limited unless you subscribe to the Click'N'Run Wharehouse (the extra $50 per year). You don't have to re-subscribe unless you need more software than what you've already downloaded. Clint explained that even though Lindows has gotten a bad rap from the Linux community, it is a great easy-to-install and easy-to-use Linux distro and probably will get more people using Linux who come from the Windows environment. Clint also took a question concerning Lindows' ability to run Windows applications. This was something they had hoped to do but realized that it isn't that easy and have since withdrawn that focus. Instead, their focus is on making a desktop Linux for users who don't want the extra difficulty in installing applications, or worrying about file permissions, which are inherently necessary in other distros (there is only a root user in Lindows). So, what's the best of the three Linux distributions? That's up to you. We encourage you try both JAMD and Lycoris which have free downloads and read the reviews on Lindows and decide for yourself. If you are lacking a high speed connection or a CD burner, you can get cheap CDs from us. Feel free to write Harry with your comments on the distros. posted by Jason 1:43 AM Friday, June 27, 2003   At the June meeting, I did a well-attended (we had 22 people) presentation on Win4Lin though quite a bit of it actually talked about the different alternatives for running Windows applications inside of Linux. You can view my slideshow online here. Win4Lin is a really great product. It's: (1) easy to install (for most major distros, one of our Slackware users hasn't been able to get it to work), (2) as fast as native Windows, (3) got reasonable hardware requirements (Pentium with 64 MB of RAM). Clearly, it's my favorite for running a complete Windows environment but it has some limitations. No support for more than one Windows distribution, each user will require their own Windows install, it won't work with NT/2000/XP, it can't network with the Linux "host" or use USB hardware other than a mouse or keyboard. For those features, you need VMWare Workstation instead. The problems with VMware are that it's slow, a resource hog and more complicated to setup, not to mention expensive! They are both limited in their sound support, no 3D card support and limited DirectX support (read: no games!). If you need only to run MS Office or a few select other applications, then CrossOver Office may be more to your liking. It's reasonably fast, a breeze to install (though it's lengthy, you can blame MS for that) and reasonably priced at about $55 USD. No Windows license is required. But if all you want to do is view Windows Media or Quicktime movies or play Shockware games online, then you might want to look at CrossOver Plugin which brings Windows plugin support to Linux. It's easy to install and cheaply priced. For the really cheap, patient and adventurous, there's always WINE. It's got an easy installer/setup program now and the CrossOver products are based on it so it might be enough for you. In other news, Trevor is now selling refreshments for $1 at the meetings and is looking into co-sponsoring PLUG t-shirts. Harry received international notoriety when an article of his on Mandrake 9.1 and Music was featured on Distrowatch and the PLUG website received about 120+ MB of traffic from it (that's more than 25x our regular amount). We even had somebody from Microsoft view the article! PLUG is now up to 20 members! posted by Jason 1:10 AM Thursday, May 29, 2003   At our May 8, 2003 meeting, we had a double feature! First, Jim Matthews, PLUG member and owner of Canadian Business Computers and IGS in Cobourg, did a talk on learning our favorite OS, finding a Linux distributor to offer it on the computers he sells, and his experience replacing a Windows server with Linux. Jim also donated a 6 GB hard drive for our webserver. You can find his company's website here as well as in the PLUG Sponsors list. In the second half, Harry "Buster" Ellis, PLUG member and retired school teacher, did a presentation using KPresenter on how he setup a multi-boot system not between Windows XP and Linux but between multiple distributions of Linux! Step by step, he outlined the obstacles, how he dealt with them and the final result. I've uploaded the presentation which you can view here. posted by Jason 10:20 PM Friday, April 11, 2003   The Club is really starting to take off now. 4 more people paid the dues lastnight and we had our highest attendance yet! At the April 10th meeting I (Clint) demoed a couple of Perl based programs that can be used to easily stream MP3s and other media over your network (and the internet if desired). We also continued our lively "Best Distro" discussion. Links relating to streaming media: GNUmp3d NAMP My Presentation PDF A handy Perl Script I wrote for generating playlists for use by the streaming software posted by Clint 2:24 PM Monday, February 24, 2003   At the February meeting Jason Wallwork did a presentation on SafeDelete, an application that gives a temporary trashcan ability to 'rm'. As far as I can tell this application isn't maintained any longer, so you won't find a homepage for it, but it seems to work on the latest distributions (I tested it under SuSE 8.1 Professional). We also discussed some recent Linux news including Mozilla 1.3 which is now in beta. safedelete-1.3-10.i386.rpm posted by Jason 10:36 PM Tuesday, December 03, 2002   On November 28, I did a presentation on how to burn CDs under Linux using mkisofs, cdrecord and xcdroast. We also talked about the ISO9660 standard, Rockridge and Joliet extensions. I learned how to do the CD burning from the CD Writing how-to at the Linux Documentation Project so I recommend that as a starting point. Fortunately, my distribution (SuSE 7.3) detected my CD burner, an LG brand model GCE-8240B 24x 10x 40x. I didn't cover how to get a burner configured initially, but the how-to covers this. I've also included a link to the MandrakeUser.org section on burning and a tutorial from the UCLA Linux User Group. CD-Writing how-to MandrakeUser.org CD Images UCLALUG CD-Writing Tutorial posted by Jason 9:05 PM   On Nov 14 I did a demo of some common Linux/Unix commands. find, grep, sed, and a bit of Perl. We had some new faces out to the meeting and I know I had a good time. Chris Ross was the winner of our first draw. He walked away with an rtl8139 based Network Card which was donated by OnlineHobbyist.com, Inc. No links this time, but try: $ man find $ man grep $ man sed $ man perl $man bash for more than you ever wanted to know about thses programs. posted by Clint 8:37 AM Tuesday, October 22, 2002   A new PLUG member, Trevor, did a cool demo on installing Debian 3.0. Apt-get rocks! The meeting was held at John's place. Thanks for the pie, cheese and refreshments, John! Here's some links for Debian: Debian site DebianPlanet DebianHELP posted by Jason 9:09 PM Friday, September 27, 2002   Last night, I did a presentation of Win4Lin, a windows emulator for Linux. I discussed some of the advantages and disadvantages of running Windows this way, as well as fielding several questions. The meeting ran way over due to some problems getting Win4Lin through the first stage of the install, but after that it was smooth sailing. I'm also writing a short review for the free newspaper, Internetworking News (available in most Peteborough/Lakefield computer stores) in the October issue. Check the links below for more information about Win4Lin. Netraverse website Running Windows programs under Linux? (Mandrake Forum posting) Windows Emulators for Linux (ComputerWorld Article) Download 15-Day Trial version posted by Jason 6:47 AM Sunday, July 07, 2002   At the July 4 meeting, I did a presentation on PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). The main part of the meeting focused on how encryption technology works, the differences between Conventional Encryption and Public Key Encryption and how PGP is a hybrid of the two. Finally, we covered how to use GnuPG (a program that uses the OpenPGP standard) with Seahorse or KMail to encrypt and decrypt messages. Below are some links on the background of PGP and how to use GnuPG under Linux: Lots of excellent documentation on PGP: PGP International website GNU Privacy Guard GnuPG Creator of PGP Phil Zimmermann posted by Jason 6:21 PM Wednesday, June 26, 2002   It's not Linux, but both the politics, and the commands are much the same. At the June 20 meeting I (Clint) shared my love for the FreeBSD operating system with a brief history of UNIX (as it relates to FreeBSD), and a guided install on two different machines. Scott Tompkins then took the reigns and showed us some console configuration options that applied equally to FreeBSD and Linux. For info on the history of UNIX and FreeBSD, and info on the various topics covered in the presentation please see: http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/ http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/kirkmck.html http://www.village.org/pdp11/faq.pages/WhatPDP.html http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/history.html http://www.netbsd.org/ http://www.openbsd.org/ http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/linuxemu.html http://www.linux.org/info/penguin.html http://www.mckusick.com/beastie/index.html http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/hardware.html posted by Clint 9:57 AM       ©2003 Peterborough Linux User Group, All Rights Reserved. Logos and buttons are used by permission of their respective owners. PLUG can not be held liable for damages resulting from the use or misuse of the information at this website or from its members. Don't run with scissors.   Comments can be sent to Jason Wallwork, Webmaster.