- WLUG - wlug.mailman3.com

cheap, small computer
by Nick Nassar Feb. 21, 2009

Feb. 21, 2009

Does anyone know of a cheap, small computer with a TV out powerful enough to run Ubuntu? Preferably something without a fan? Nick

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Few things from last night's meeting
by Eric Martin Feb. 20, 2009

Feb. 20, 2009

A couple of things from last night's meeting / dinner that might interest everybody: [IRC] I know people have mentioned it before but WLUG has an irc channel. We're on freenode and it's #wlug-ma. IRC stands for Internet Relay chat and is used for sync communication between people. Check out this wikipedia link [1] for more info. get a copy of Xchat (irc client) and when you open xchat it should prompt you for a server. Click freenode. Next it may ask you for a channel to join, type in #wlug-ma. If it doesn't ask for a channel to join, type "/join #wlug-ma" in the command bar at the bottom. [PGP Keys] Some people mentioned that their pgp keys are expiring in roughly 2 months so we need to have a keysigning again. If your key is expiring soon I would suggest generating a new key now and signing your new key with your old key. This will allow the web of trust to extend to your new key. For generating new keys, there are a few schools of thought. Some people prefer to have their master key be unlimited and generate new subkeys every so often (1/year, etc). This way signatures go to the master key but the subkeys can always be revoked if there's a problem. Others generate a key pair with a 3-5 year expiration and just get signatures again as they need them. The thing to keep in mind is how possible is it that my key will be cracked [expiration] years from now given technology. I think the current plan is to have the key signing in two months (please correct me if I'm wrong) so I'll be sending more stuff out as it gets closer. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRC -- Eric Martin Key fingerprint = D1C4 086E DBB5 C18E 6FDA B215 6A25 7174 A941 3B9F

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Is MS becoming less evil?
by Clint Moyer Feb. 17, 2009

Feb. 17, 2009

I'd say no, but there is this: http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/red-hat-virtualization-deal… http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization/archive/2009/02/15/Microsoft-and-Re…

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REMINDER: Upcoming meeting THURS 7PM
by Andy Stewart Feb. 17, 2009

Feb. 17, 2009

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 HI everybody, Our monthly WLUG meeting will be held this coming Thursday, Feb 19th, at 7:00 PM in the Access Grid room on the WPI campus in Worcester, MA USA. We don't have a specific topic for this meeting unless we get a volunteer from the audience between now and the meeting time. As always, light refreshments will be available at the meeting, and we'll go out for pizza afterwards. See ya there! Andy - -- Andy Stewart, Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group (http://www.wlug.org) Chelmsford Linux Meetup Group (http://linux.meetup.com/393) Amateur Radio: KB1OIQ -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with SUSE - http://enigmail.mozdev.org iD8DBQFJminTHl0iXDssISsRAtsWAJ0SUghV2rZBFgAZ+vQ0r102C/YfswCfeUi3 P3IOTZmoXAfc33wsQe84umY= =bCTv -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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GIMP tutorials
by E Johnson Feb. 14, 2009

Feb. 14, 2009

A couple of WLUG members had been interested in GIMP a few months back. A presentation I gave to the group last Fall may have been effective that it could have been, since we couldn't get the big monitors working in the meeting room. But now while looking for one piece of info, I came across this in article Linux Haxor: "50 Tutorials To Get You Started With Gimp." http://www.linuxhaxor.net/2009/02/09/50-tutorials-to-get-you-started-with-g… Some of these tutorials seem to be concerned with specific special effects, but others, such as "Using and Manipulating Layers with Gimp" and "Retouching hair and eye (video)" might be of interest to non-artist persons, and to those who want to work with photos they have uploaded from digital camera. Enjoy, Liz J

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Miro gets a makeover
by Richard Klein Feb. 14, 2009

Feb. 14, 2009

I haven't read the article yet, but it looks like Miro 2.0 has launched. Miro was the topic of last month's meeting. http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/10/miro-gets-a-makeover/ -- Rich

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tux's new prison
by Doug Mildram Feb. 14, 2009

Feb. 14, 2009

Suffering from "temporary" (winter) shrinkage, Tux looks a bit worried in his "new" computer room..... OK so he's homeless and I merely bought him a bottle and a limited air supply with the other derelicts in my man-cave... ( ! warning, no disturbing images, 3 boring pix at.... ) http://dmildram.jalbum.net/Server+DesktopClutter/index.html

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Lenovo S10 Netbook
by Mike Leo Feb. 13, 2009

Feb. 13, 2009

I picked one of these up at Circuit City last week and am looking to speed it up where ever possible. (Reviewed below). It has a normal SATA II drive in it and I know an SSD drive would significantly speed it up, but don't want to spend any more $ on it. http://www.trustedreviews.com/storage/review/2008/05/08/OCZ-64GB-SATA-II-SS… has pretty graphs to compare. I weaseled a RAM upgrade out of my hard ware guy so I have 1.5gigs in it now (max'd). I ran speed tests between booting off the SATA II drive and the same install via USB 2.0 thumb drive and boot times were around 50 seconds for either. I know there are SSD ExpressCards for cheap (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820191057) but I read that the ExpressCards are really just USB 2.0 speeds anyway so I wouldn't see any difference from my thumb drive test. Short of compiling my own kernel (which I never can seem to do right), any other advise on how to speed up a netbook's boot time? I will say once booted, everything runs pretty well, though I'm sure I wouldn't mind more speed then, too! grazie! Mike Review: Stopped in to Circuit City today and (impulsively?) bought a Lenovo IdeaPad S10. I've been looking for something to waste my money on/replace the Dell I bought that I ended up not liking and turning over to my wife, so it wasn't extremely impulsive, just a little impulsive. Anyway, it was 10% of the normal price, which brought it down to $370. Not a great deal at that price since online it is like $350 or so, but the one I got has twice as much RAM and hard drive space as online numbers, plus no shipping. Specs: Intel Atom N270 1.6ghz CPU (Intel has returned to multi-threading) 10.2 inch screen 1GIG RAM 160Gig SATA II Hard drive Wired/Wireless NIC cards 3 Cell Lithium-Ion 2.64lbs No CDROM (not a big deal as I have a Lenovo USB CDROM drive anyway) The size: possibly the perfect size...small, light weight without being tiny. 10.2 inch 1024x600 screen and not an impossibly tiny keyboard (though obviously not full sized). It is about the size of a larger hard cover book. The OS: Comes with Windows XP and it ran very well...applications opened fast, web surfing was responsive and I could open several apps at once without much hit to performance. After 27 different questions about my loyalty to Bill Gates, I decided it was time to upgrade. Concerned that the new hardware may have issues with older versions of Linux, I jumped right into an as-yet-to-be released version of Ubuntu (9.04). Booted right up, answered a couple questions and installed like a champ...saw the disk, the RAM, the wireless card, everything...during the install. Upon reboot into Linux though, nothing...it just wouldn't boot. "No OS found". I thought my partitioning might be screwing me up, so I let the installer pick, but to no avail. I booted off live CD's, but when I mounted and chroot'd into my install, the install didn't even see my /dev/sda. At one point I finally got to a grub > boot, but still wouldn't boot to the OS. I tried a Debian 4.0 install, but that didn't see either the wired or wireless nics. Similar to the Ubuntu, Fedora 10 installed, but would never boot. So I tried a Ubuntu 8.10 install and everything was fine! Installed with my partitions (/boot, /, /home and swap) and all is well in the world. Wired, wireless, SATA, screen resolution....everything works straight from the install. I'm still testing and upgrading but over all this is a great netbook and takes to Ubuntu Linux straight away, and for less than $400 a great addition to my daily commute.

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How to (not) Damage a FLASH Storage Device
by Chuck Anderson Feb. 6, 2009

Feb. 6, 2009

I found this article enlightening: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/How_to_Damage_a_FLASH_Storage_Device

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Any ruby hackers?
by John Stoffel Feb. 6, 2009

Feb. 6, 2009

Guys, I'm looking for some help with a Ruby script which uses the 'Drb' and 'Slave' libraries. Basically, I'm doing a recursive readdir() on a directory, but with parallel processes (since Ruby Threads aren't really parallel, sigh...) and I'm running into some problems. I'm happy to post the code here, before I start begging for help on the http://www.ruby-forum.com site. Thanks, John

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