Jan 2011 Meeting Notes

We had a small group of 6-8 people this evening.

Items of Interest:
Brad was getting 25Mb Business Class Fiber from Verizon.
He said it took 30 calls to setup the order.

Talked about how Linux and Ubuntu are doing things differently. There seems to be a desire to make Linux more friendly to the masses. As a result, controls under the hood seem to be getting covered up by developers. Although this is helping new Linux users, hiding the controls is frustrating older Linux users. At the 27th Chaos Communication Congress in Europe, a sysadmin, Wolfgang Draxinger attempted to complain about missing documentation and his frustration with the current state of where Linux is going. We think that his goal was to show how Linux is becoming evil with it’s heavy dependence on multimedia. More specifically, Pulse audio, gdm, gs-streamer, and phonon are not very well documented. However, the developer of these applications had strategically placed himself in the audience and made is presentation a little award. Although there was a dialog between developer and users, the air of superiority from this one developer is exemplified in this youtube video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTdUmlGxVo0

In the meeting, there was further talk of how to make Ubuntu like and feel like the old versions of Linux. More specifically, to get the virtual terminals now you need Console-kit. Console-kit is an application that keeps track who is logged in. Virtual-Terminal switching is being turned off in many newer distos. It needs to be explicitly turned on to use it now.

Brad talked more about puppet. Puppet allows you to run the same command on multiple machines. For example, if you need a jpg on a specific machine in a server farm, you run the puppet master command on your designated controller and the command gets executed on all the machines in the group. Puppet is saving Brad and his company a lot development time.

Dave D. mentioned that he purchased some Indy Games from humble indie bundle. The humble bundle generated $1M for charity.
Linux Games
———–
Indy game ( humble bundle.com)
Amnesia the dark decent.
Dragon Age.
Infocom Games.
Oregon Trail

Brad has been using Suse Studio. To develop turnkey openvpn applications his customers can download.

We also discussed on-line gaming. Recently a person purchased a virtual space station for $600K. The previous owner purchased the virtual space station for $200K.
Pictures of the virtual space station can be found here.

There was also a question about how to wipe disks and Brad posted a solution for this on the list serve.