Meeting Notes Oct 2 2006

About 7 people showed up.

Questions/Problems

What defines a distro ?
How can you view DVD’s on Linux ?
Troubleshooting X when it is not working right.

What defines a distro ?
This was actually a hard question to answer. It is almost like trying to define what makes one soup different from another soup. Yes, when trying to define them Linux distributions seem like soup. They have some core ingredients that make them similar but they all taste and feel different. For example, Fedora, Red Hat, and Centos all seem to be distros of the same family. They have very similar commands and ways of doing things. However, the support and licences are diffent. In the Debian family there is Knoppix, Ubunto to name two. Ubunto is designed to be a desktop OS while Debian is designed like RedHat to do be both a server and desktop. In short, a distro seems to be Linux with tools and packages the developers, or soup cooks, throw in it.

How can you run DVD’s on Linux ?
To get DVD’s to run on Linux you need a media kit. Xine is a good one that most use. With Xine you can normally view most unprotected DVD’s. However, if you want your Linux machine to view the new movies most of them have protection. Technicially it is very easy to view protected CD’s. To view them you need to find a script called libdvdcss. The script is not in the software packages, because the Digitial Millenium Copyright act makes writing Free Software to read DVDs illegal. Thus, it is illegal to write Free Software that allows people to view commerically protected DVD’s under Linux. There is legislation in some of the more free counties outside the US to deal with these pro-big-business laws.

Troubleshooting X.
X is a bear. When it works all is good. However, there are many times it will not work. Thus, troubleshooting is required. On Mark’s laptop Dave and Mark came to the conclusion the debian package called 915resolution has some bugs that causes the video drivers to seg fault when the X package is run as a regualr user. Looked at logs, checked permissions, and isolated the source of the problem to the 915 resolution package.