May 5, 2010 CLUG Meeting Notes

We talked about the mail server going down. The problem was that the Mailman service had stopped. We've got a cron job that now checks it periodically, and we're going to keep a closer eye on it. Should you ever have problems sending mail to the list, send an email to the CLUG President and let them know.

There was a quick look at Cowsay, and how you can alias it to different commands for comical effect.

With Greg Saunders supplying a machine, the contest to root his server continued. We looked at several different methods of attack, such as filling the hard drive with junk and "fork-bombing", where the CPU is overrun by seperate processes. Both attacks can be prevented by modifying /etc/security/limits.conf

There was brief overview of F.O.G., which is a free hard-drive cloning program. It looked pretty cool, and Kin offered to give a demonstration at the next meeting. There were also comparisons drawn between FOG and Clonezilla.

There was a demo of KVM and V.I.M.I.N.A.L. VODKA lab, which serves as a tutorial for virtualization.

We looked at the new GRUB 2, which has several significant changes from the original GRUB boot-loader.

Kin talked about the CLUG table at the Calgary Climb and Run, and asked people to guess whether a monitor or a toner cartridge was more ecologically devastating (it's the monitor, which is full of lead). Out of that event, it looks like CLUG will be working with the ERA on a future booth.

We talked about COSSFest, and how the videos are online now.

We took a quick look look at how to build your own Ubuntu live CD.

We examined the old CLUG.ca, and came up with some ideas to make it more lively and useful. You'll be seeing some of those ideas soon! :-)

There was a discussion on which eBook readers were better. The Kobo reader looked cheap, both in price and in construction. Alongside the Sony Reader, both had grayscale screens, looked to be unsuitable for PDF's, but appear to be compatible with Linux. The Apple iPad has the colour screen, but it is expensive and no one at the meeting knew if it's Linux compatible. Members are encouraged to bring their eBook readers to the next meeting!

We looked at a couple of GNU core utilities, such as 'cal' (and its funny 1752 formatting), as well as 'factor'. There will be some cheat sheets made up for the next meeting outlining all the GNU utilities.

We did a quick review of the micro-presentation format, and it has potential. We'll be fine-tuning it over the next few months, and in the future will have the list of proposed talk topics posted ahead of the meeting. It's already succeeding in getting new people showing off lots of cool tricks with Linux!

See you all at the next meeting on June 2nd, 2010!