Annapolis Linux Users Group

Labor day is the first week of September so we will meet on Sept 8th 2008.

About 6 people showed up.

John Massey from Washington College talked about alternative Open Source trouble ticketing system. On his mac, he was running a virtual session with Ubuntu. On Ubuntu, he had GLPI running. On GLPI he was using a inventory module called OSC inventory. Together the two applications integrate together created a full featured trouble ticketing system that is linked with a asset database. John said this new system would help reduce typing for technicians.

In addition, to talking about the Open-source Trouble ticketing system, John gave an overview of the features of the Linux Media center. The Linux media center seems to be an over-the-top media application that combines both home automation, home security, and VOIP with a media center. The media center will work with X10 devices. It also allows you to access your digital media anywhere in the house.

John also talked about OpenMoko. These are the first large scale production of an open source phone.

Dave Dodge talked about a new open source video game he found called sauerbraten. The game maps seem to be very complex.

John from the Labor Dept, showed off his new 64bit laptop running Centos 5.2. Accordingly, he said that he attempted install Ubuntu 32 bit and Ubuntu 64 but had no success.

Dave talked compiz and how many of the older Nvidia cards have pixel limitations. The pixel limitations become an issue when you attach multiple large screens. However, the latests Nvidia cards do not have this limitation.

I talked a little about how I was creating custom Nagios plugins and how easy it was to create the plugins.

I would like to find a new place to meet in Annapolis. More specifically, although Barnes and Nobles is an easy site for people to find us, we are limited in what we can do. In the future, I would like the LUG to have the option of more formal presentations. Moreover, I think we need to start having a few install fests to get some new members. As for the seating at Barnes and Nobles, I am getting worried. The knitters are taking many of the chairs in the coffee shop. If you know of a place near Annapolis where we my be able to meet let me know. Thanks.
–Ted–

About 6 people showed up for the meeting.

Short meeting. We only trouble shot Mark’s laptop chatted a little and all left. The meeting started about 8PM.

Mark brought in his laptop and was complaining that he was not able to the SMP kernel module to run. We did some basic troubleshooting and sure enough the kernel was switching to Uniprocessor on boot. He had turned of APCI so there was the suggestion that turning off this may have caused the kernel not able to detect the multiple cores that existed on his HP laptop.
Mark had a copy of a kernel config from another person who ran Gentoo and was going to try that config later. He needed the SMP kernel for Labview.

Mark mentioned that Berry is an OpenSource project that allows sync data from his Debian box to his Blackberry.
He was using Berry to import music and audio files that he listened to while on the commuter bus.

We had about 5 people show up for this meeting.

During the beginning of the meeting we had a lengthy discussion of RedHat vs SUSE.
Two members were having problems with RHEL 5 upgrades. Apparently, the new version of RedHat goes out and gets updates automatically. Although this my be a configuration that need to be modified in the RHEL network it appears the defaults are causing problems. For Dustin, auto upgrades were breaking custom installs of Postfix. He had compiled Postfix from source to include some database patches that were missing in the standard Postfix RPM. Additionally, for Micheal, a recent security from RHEL 5.1 to RHEL 5.2 broke some clustering functionality he needed for his RHEL super computer. Both were generally frustrated with RHEL. According to Micheal, SUSE is tested much longer when upgrade releases come out.

Micheal provided a little more information on Xen. He mentioned that SUSE Xen is benchmarked as one of the fastest. Additionally, he mentioned that the Microsoft/SUSE co-operation is helping SUSE get more interoperability with Windows machines. He thought the arrangement was a good thing for Linux and Microsoft.

Dustin had some questions about speeding up compiling under C. Originally, Dustin expressed some interested in purchasing more hardware. Rather than spending money, Dave suggested that Dustin use a software solution called ccache for speeding up his compiles. According to Dave, ccache can speed up gcc. GCC is speed up when it does parallel builds.

Nick brought in some questions about NFS and SELinux. Nick’s clients were not able to connect to the NFS server. Since SELinux was running, Dave suggested that Nick run SELinux in permissive mode and get NFS working first. It appears implementing SELinux is a little difficult. It is good to run SELinux in permissive mode until everything is setup and working. Once everything is working, there are programs that can parse the SELinux exception logs and create a policy. Sometimes files that are modified in permissive mode need to be relabeled before the policy will work. All in all SELinux adds another layer of complexity that takes time to implement properly.

Different version control systems for developing software were discussed. Dustin and Nick both use Subversion. However, Dave used git and now uses something else called ‘Mach-areal’. I could not find the later.

There was talk about some of the Google whitepapers that are public. According to Dustin, reading Google white papers is good way to keep to up to date with what it happening in the world of software development. For example, Dustin read many of the white papers on what Google has worked on recenltly. He recommended that others read the following: BigTable, GoogleFS, and Map Produce.