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Reminder: WLUG meeting tonight
by Tim Keller Aug. 13, 2020

Aug. 13, 2020

We've got a meeting tonight. We're online and jabbering away. https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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We've got a meeting on Thursday!!!
by Tim Keller Aug. 11, 2020

Aug. 11, 2020

Hey Everybody! We've got a meeting on Thursday! The pandemic continues and Technopia continues to be closed so we'll continue to meet virtually at our same location... I hope everybody is doing okay. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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asterisk or other linux pbx
by Bradley Noyes July 24, 2020

July 24, 2020

Hi All, I’m considering a move from a traditional (and proprietary) PBX to something open-source that i can manage. I know very little about this, so i’m trying to understand if my goal is even possible. Given that our provider (i.e. gatekeeper) is Comcast, i worry they prevent running self-hosted VOIP boxes. Currently the office has 4 lines supplied by comcast. The comcast cable modem has 4 telephone lines going into a Panasonic PBX, which they dispatch the calls to the POTS phones. I want to replace the Panasonic PBX since its proprietary and requires a call into the phone company to change anything. I have very little knowledge in this area, so i’m wondering if anyone here has had experience in this area. Thanks! - brad

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Reminder! Meeting tonight! Topic: min.io demo and then general discussion at 7PM!
by Tim Keller July 9, 2020

July 9, 2020

Hey Gang, We've got a meeting tonight at 7PM! It's still virtual because you know, the pandemic. Hopefully in the future we'll be able to stand 6' apart from each other and hang out! But until then, there's Jitsi! We'll be meeting here: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA at 7PM! We'll likely jibber jab until it's late.. My neighbors house may or may not catch on fire again! I'm going to show off Min.IO running in a docker container. I can show the web interface and then we'll stick some objects in the container. I know that several other WLUG members are also using it in production so it'll be interesting to get their take on it as well. Then I suspect we'll end up talking about all things nerdy! See you! Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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recommended printer/3-in-1 laser B+W for general (Linux and Windows clients)
by Doug Mildram July 9, 2020

July 9, 2020

Hi! Hope this doesnt start a HUGE preference debate, but I'm taking feedback on what some of you already know to be a "solid" not too big laser black+white, flatbed/top scanner+copier (no top sheet feeder please, adds too much space/width) BUT THE PAIN is always in the PRINTER drivers/software, win or linux, in my experience. Honestly, been battling w/PDF's too long, to an old-ish Brother HL-L2395DW 3-in-1 --I'm working mostly on Linux Mint 19 (a deviant ubuntu I highly recommend for ex-win users) --Printing most things OK. IIRC, didnt have to find Linux drivers the hard way. --Printing PDF's gets iffy. LibreOffice sometimes cures my blues; DocumentViewer is probably the worst, "evince" also iffy, etc. Sometimes "Data received"....ends with a silent chirp, sometimes printer panel indicates a quick reject (nothing printed) saying "Out of Memory", BUT REALLY it's not the job == big, I think it must be a nasty runaway/leaky PDF->driver thing, but if I -- copy/email/send the nasty job to a win7 laptop and use AcroRead, USUALLY gets it done. Until today when ALL seemed to fail, I'm ready to cough up a few $hundred for a better beast, with wired ethernet+USB though I suppose it's pointless to avoid wireLESS interface as long as it does wired ethernet. Oh look! Today's impossible job just came out, from where! Losing my mind. Budget: since not color, I could go over $300 or so, where most of the decent ones sit. Been an HP fan for a long time, but things change, and I'm open to other solid models. Thx!

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Reminder, we've got a meeting next week!
by Tim Keller July 4, 2020

July 4, 2020

Hey Gang, I hope you're having a happy and healthy safe 4th of July!! We've got a meeting next week! I'm going to give a quick demo on Min.io, we'll do a round table and I'm sure general tom foolery will occur! Our usual Jitsi haunt will be where we'll meet until things improve, though it's looking better for New England and worse for everybody else.. My hope is soon we'll be meeting at Technopia, but until then, we'll keep the candle burning anyway we can! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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3D printing RC planes
by Richard Klein June 26, 2020

June 26, 2020

I just watched a webinar from these guys. Those of you with 3D printers might want to check them out. https://www.3daeroventures.com/ -- Rich

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Great meeting last night... but we need topics...
by Tim Keller June 24, 2020

June 24, 2020

Hey Gang, Thanks for everybody who showed up, we had a great time! We also had a couple new people show which was great! However, it's clear that even doing the virtual meetings, we need to have a topic.. we simply ran out of stuff to talk about... For the next meeting I'm going to do a talk on https://min.io/ It's an open source object storage system that works just like S3 only you can host it locally. IF people have things they'd like to talk about let me know! Thanks, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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WLUG Meeting tomorrow night (June 11th) , via Jitsi! @7PM
by Tim Keller June 10, 2020

June 10, 2020

Hey Gang, We've got a virtual wlug meeting tomorrow night via JitSi at 7PM! The link is going to be: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA I also announced it on the meetup so who knows who'll show up! Maybe our meeting will get bombed! The topic is going to be the usual... come, be nerdy we'll talk about everything! Like I said before, at some point in the future we'll be actually meeting up in person, hopefully at Technopia! However, we need to coordinate with them and do it safe and sensibly. Later, Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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June virtual meeting!
by Tim Keller June 9, 2020

June 9, 2020

Hey Gang! Well, we're still not quite out of it, so this month's meeting is going to be virtual again. I've been watching Technopia's website and they're now open to members only. I think when it's open to the general public, we'll follow the CDC guidelines, see what Technopia wants to do and have a real in person meeting. I hope everybody has kept sane, okay less crazy, during the quarantine. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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X1 Carbon Gen8 review
by joshua.gage.stone＠gmail.com June 7, 2020

June 7, 2020

Hey all, Since Lenovo has been making announcements about shipping Linux on their machines [1] and expanding on their certifications [2], I decided to purchase an X1 Carbon Gen8 [3] as my newest daily driver. I thought I'd share some thoughts after installing Fedora 32 on it. Chassis: The X1 Carbon has excellent build quality. Despite being an ultrathin laptop, it feels quite solid in my hands and is well-balanced when grasping with one hand. Weighing in at 2.38 lbs, it's much lighter and smaller than my T480 (4.03 lbs) which makes it more ideal for traveling. The laptop doesn't flex or wobble when typing either. Ports: The number of ports is quite good compared to other ultrathin laptops like the Dell XPS 13 and Macbook. Two USB-C ports are available which are its main method of charging (very useful for sharing cables too). There are two also standard USB-A ports, as well as an HDMI port and headphone jack. There isn't native ethernet which is a bit of a disappointment, but fortunately this is mitigated with a dongle that comes with the laptop. There isn't an SD card slot or even a microSD slot either, but the SD card reader dongle I already use with my desktop can be used instead. Monitor: The FHD 400 nit screen is very good. Costa Rica 4K [4] -- which is typically used as a benchmark for demonstrating display quality -- looks quite nice on it. I don't have a colorimeter [5] on hand for measuring the full capabilities of the screen in a more empirical fashion, but it should be capable of showing the full sRGB range as well as covering most of Adobe RGB. The 4K HDR 500 nit configuration should be more ideal if color reproduction and HDR are of utmost importance. Keyboard: Thinkpads are well renowned for their keyboards, and the keyboard on the Carbon is no exception. The keys feel just right to me when typing, not being too mushy or too clicky. They also don't give off much noise, which is very much appreciated when working in a quiet room. Speakers: I'm quite happy with the quality of the Dolby Atmos speakers. Usually laptop speakers are a disappointment to me, but the speakers on the Carbon are more than capable of handling different genres of music. The speaker alignment being upward-facing instead of side-facing as seen in other thinkpads also makes it better for watching videos and listening to music with other people. It does seem a bit lacking in bass-heavy music [6], but the built-in DAC is more than capable of driving a pair of good-quality headphones [7]. I might have to make an update on this later because Dolby Atmos support on Linux appears to be a work in progress and may need a preset to have it more closely match the speaker output on Windows [8] in the meantime. Battery: I can get a decent amount of battery life from the 51Wh battery, usually about 14 hours with light usage and medium screen brightness on stock Fedora. I think I could easily squeeze more battery life out of it if I installed Powertop or TLP, but hopefully battery optimizations land in upstream so no extra work needs to be done by the time Fedora 33 comes out. Noise & thermals: This laptop is quiet! Even when playing 1080p@60fps video in a quiet room, the fan don't make any audible noise. Multi-core workloads like code compiling also don't seem to be an issue on this laptop. Sensors report roughly 70C during such workloads, and the fan gives off a low amount of noise that's well within acceptable range. Performance & Stability: The i7-10510U performs quite well. It appears to be about as fast as the R5 2600X in my desktop at compile tasks, which is especially impressive considering this is in an ultrathin laptop! It also remains responsive for multitasking while compiling, still being able to play fullscreen video in Firefox while dropping a few frames when attempting to switch tabs (considering it's able to sustain full 60fps playback otherwise while most cores are saturated, this is still acceptable). Suspend support on the Carbon is rock solid too. I've repeatedly closed the lid and opened it back up to have it immediately wake up from suspend, making it ideal for keeping around on standby for when I want to look something up. Vendor Support: Almost everything about this laptop works out of the box on Fedora, with one exception being that firmware for the fingerprint sensor is currently still in testing and needs to be explicitly enabled [9] if you want to enable fingerprint login & authentication from Gnome Settings Since I bought the Carbon before Lenovo started offering a configuration with Linux preinstalled, I ended up paying for a Windows license. Lenovo support however was quite understanding of my situation in having no desire to run Windows on it, and provided a refund for the license. I think this is noteworthy since they previously didn't offer a refund when I previously bought my T480 a few years ago. Enabling hardware decoding support for improving CPU usage and battery life [10] is also trivial. Firefox appears to consume 15%-25% CPU during fullscreen 1080p@60fps video playback, and VLC is usually using 8%-15% for the same video. It's worth noting that Firefox's accelerated decoding support is still bleeding-edge and probably has room for optimizations, and I'd imagine VLC could be even more efficient once it has native Wayland support. Conclusion: Overall, I'm very happy with this laptop, both on the software and hardware side. Despite being brand new, the out-of-the-box Linux support has been some of the best I've seen in a long time and the tweaks I've had to do for it were quite minimal. I think once Lenovo sorts out their official Linux support (I still don't see it offered as an OS option in the customization page), they'll have a truly stellar product that they can market to Linux users as a daily driver. Sources: 1. https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ 2. https://news.lenovo.com/pressroom/press-releases/lenovo-brings-linux-certif… 3. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpad-x/X1-Carbon-Gen-8-/p… 4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXb3EKWsInQ 5. https://www.amazon.com/X-Rite-Color-Munki-Smile-ColorMunki/dp/B009APMNB0/ 6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgRr0CLFhaw 7. https://www.amazon.com/Audio-Technica-ATH-M50xBT-Wireless-Bluetooth-Headpho… 8. https://github.com/JackHack96/PulseEffects-Presets/tree/master/irs 9. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lenovo_ThinkPad_X1_Carbon_(Gen_7)#Fing… 10. https://mastransky.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/firefox-on-fedora-finally-gets-…

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Signing a driver for UEFI in Debian
by Richard Klein June 1, 2020

June 1, 2020

I'm trying to build Droidcam. Part of the install process wants to sign a driver: "Secure Boot is enabled, attempting to sign the driver please specify signing key location (or leave empty to sign manually later) You can Google 'secure boot' for your distro Enter the path of the public key:" Googling didn't show me a clear answer. Does anyone know what path it's looking for? -- Rich

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8GB Pi4 announced!!!
by Tim Keller May 29, 2020

May 29, 2020

The Pi4 people announced an 8GB version for $75! That's enough ram you could run a chrome tab or two! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Creating Hotspot and Fedora 32
by Dennis Payne May 19, 2020

May 19, 2020

I upgraded to Fedora 32 last night. I can create a hotspot like I did with Fedora 31 but connecting to it fails. I use: nmcli dev wifi hotspot ifname wlp3s0 ssid <name> password <password> Is there something else I need to do with Fedora 32? -- Dennis Payne dulsi(a)identicalsoftware.com https://social.freegamedev.net/channel/dulsi

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Reminder: Meeting tomorrow! Your/My/Everybody's house! 7PM! via Jitsi!
by Tim Keller May 13, 2020

May 13, 2020

Hey Everybody, Yup, we're all trapped at home like crazed rats in a maze, but that can't stop us from having a WLUG meeting! Location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA Time: 7pm - Whenever we want to stop! Topic: Lots of stuff I'm sure! Snacks and refreshments sadly won't be provided, though expect a fair amount of eating and drinking on camera! Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Manjaro - Caffeine Question
by hammerron May 10, 2020

May 10, 2020

I'm looking a bit at Manjaro 20.0, with Gnome, and when I first ran, saw in the top right (system tray?) a coffee cup symbol. I believe that this means that the Caffeine-ng program might have been running. I have not seen the coffee cup symbol since. I tried to click on the Caffeine icon, and also the Caffeine Preferences icon, but seems like nothing happened. I tried searching the Manjaro forums and have not found a solution. Any thoughts? (Sent it to the WLUG, maybe Forrest or another Manjaro user will see it ) Ron

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RDP into Win10 with Remmina
by Richard Klein April 29, 2020

April 29, 2020

I'm getting tired of booting into Windows for work. I figured out how to connect to the VPN from Debian, but it would be very helpful to RDP into the workstation in my office. I know the URL for my workstation, the domain, the username, and the password, but I'm failing to get it to work. What should I try? Remmina says "Connecting to <server>..." for a minute, then fails with "Connection to RDP server <server> failed." -- Rich

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Fedora 32 release
by Joshua Stone April 28, 2020

April 28, 2020

Hey everyone, Fedora 32 came out today and it looks very solid! Here's a post detailing many of the core improvements: https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-32/ https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2020/04/28/fedora-workstation-swamp-draining… I'm quite happy to see so much work going into components that I use every day, including Gnome Shell, Toolbox, Wayland, and Pipewire. The Firefox improvements should be especially helpful for when we do our next Jitsi Meet call. -Josh

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Does LINUX still exist?
by Ken Jones April 24, 2020

April 24, 2020

I am trying for figure out what, if anything, of FEDORA RED HAT LINUX is still available. I have downloaded a DVD that I plan to install on my DELL XPS desktop PC running WINDOWS 10. Will it find for me my old LINUX atmosphere? Ken Jones

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April WLUG meeting to be online
by Tim Keller April 24, 2020

April 24, 2020

Hey Gang, I hope everybody is staying safe and healthy. While Linux doesn't need virus protection, we do. Wash your hands you filthy animals. As the subject reads, we're going to be doing the WLUG meeting online. I've been active in the wlug-ma irc channel as have others. What do people think about Jitsi for doing a video meetup? Refreshments will not be provided and we won't be going out for dinner!! Stay home, stay safe and I hope we'll all get to see each other soon. Later, Tim. -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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Lenovo shipping Linux pre-installed
by Joshua Stone April 24, 2020

April 24, 2020

Hey everyone, Apparently Lenovo is planning on shipping Fedora on their Thinkpad lines, and will use only packages from the official repos instead of custom packages. I think this is great news as somebody who shopped for Thinkpads before and had to contact support about refunding a Windows license (turns out that wasn't possible at the time). Having a distro pre-installed should mean improved hardware compatibility, and maybe even be able contact support for Linux-specific issues. More info here: https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ -Josh

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audit root/sudo users for RHEL 6 server
by John Malloy April 18, 2020

April 18, 2020

What is the best way to provide proof to an audit person who needs to know all the root/sudo users for a RHEL 6 server? (I am new at this company, and don't have access to all their resources) We can provide the /etc/passwd & /etc/sudoers file (the auditor may not know how to read these files) We also have the RedHat Identity Management running here, but I am not familiar with this tool. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks! John Malloy jomalloy(a)gmail.com

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April WLUG virtual meeting was a resounding success!
by Tim Keller April 13, 2020

April 13, 2020

Hey Everybody, I just wanted to give a shout out to everybody who showed up to the virtual meeting last night. It was cool to see Maddog show up, I'm glad he's staying safe and healthy. Yeah, there were a couple of audio/video hiccups, but I thought overall it went great. I shared my screen a couple of times and that worked just fine as well. One cool thing that was brought up doing the meeting and I thought was worth talking about is "vscodium" which is a 100% open source recompile of the visual studio code editor. The big difference is that the vscode as shipped from microsoft contains telemetry tracking data that gets sent back to the mothership... https://vscodium.com/ solves that problem. We obviously jibber jabbed about COVID19 and folding@home and Logan showed off the facemasks he's been printing as well as the antennae he's building to contact a long lost satellite in geostationary orbit. While it wasn't the same as a physical meeting, when we do manage to get ourselves all back in the same room, I think it's something we'll definitely incorporate into the physical meetings. Stay safe, stay healthy and wash your hands! We'll see what May brings us and decide from there... Tim. WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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ansible layout thoughts
by John Stoffel April 13, 2020

April 13, 2020

Guys, I'm starting to work on deplying ansible at $WORK to start managing a bunch of existing servers. The goal is to A) get them consistent, B) learn ansible, and C) automate deployments so if I get hit by a bus, they can have a hope of keeping things going. So my first thoughts are about organization. Ansible is a file/directory heavy setup. And I understand how a task has one or more roles. And then a playbook can have one or more tasks. But it's how to manage the overall site or bundles of playbooks that I want to understand. I've looked at: https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/user_guide/playbooks_best_practices… and I think I can deal with the first layout suggestion, but I'd porbably put playbooks into a playbooks/ directory. But... how to keep them organized as my collection grows. Do I want a new directory structure for each group of playbooks? For example I want to do: - add ssh-keys for logins - make sure right repo(s) are configured - ntp client config - postfix config - NIS config - fstab config - nsswitch.conf config So ideally all of the above would be a playbook each, since for example ntp config, would/could include: - install ntp - install default client config - restart ntpd once configured - etc... Where it all comes down to is keeping all this organized nicely, especially as it grows ever more complicated. All the silly examples of setting up a LAMP stack completely gloss over the actual pushing of content, which is really what we want to do. So, thoughts? Real life experience? Suggestions for good training classes? Unfortunately it would have to be online now, not my preferred in-person training.... John

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Virtual meeting today! Starting at 7pm, via Jitsi!!
by Tim Keller April 13, 2020

April 13, 2020

Hey Gang, We've got a virtual meeting today! We're all going to meet on Jitsi! Here's the location: https://meet.jit.si/WlugMA The big blue button stuff looks really awesome, but I haven't had a chance to dig into it, however for presenting it looks pretty awesome. I hope everybody is staying sane and staying safe. Later, Tim Keller WLUG President -- I am leery of the allegiances of any politician who refers to their constituents as "consumers".

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