Meeting Notes March 7 2006

About 8 People showed up.

Topics discussed:
1. Make Magazine
2. Non Agressive video games for kids.
3. SATA devices
4. Academy Awards
5. Backing up a home directory and using scp.
6. Ham Fest (next is Sat 3/25/06)
7. Books
8. Commerical Kernel mods.

1. Make Magzine is a neat magazine that shows how to make cool technical things with common household products.

2. Most video games for kids have an agressive genre associated with them. Thus, it is very
hard to find non-agressive ones that keep their interest. Tux Racer, Frozen Bubble, and Professor Fiz Wizzle were games that were discussed as alternatives.

3. Some SATA devices work on Linux. Some will probably work in the near future. Thus, if you want to purchase a device make sure the kernel that you are using has support for device. More specifically, the SATA controller has to be supported in the kernel. This can be found by looking in the /usr/src/linux or looking at the supported device document for your favorite distribution. Not all SATA contolled devices are the same, and not all of them work on Linux. One example, was one person in the LUG purchased a SATA device that worked on Debian Stable. The second machine would only work with a mix of Debian Testing/Stable that included newly added drivers.

4. Nick mentioned that the ‘March of the Penguins’ one the best documentary award.

5. Someone had a problem with a SUSE upgrade. They upgraded SUSE from a low version to the current version. The upgrade broke the USB, Floppy, CDrom, support. On calling SUSE support, this person was told that Novell only supports upgrades when the upgrade is done in steps. For example, to get to SUSE 10 from 9. You have to upgrade to 9.1,9.2, and all the increments in between for support to help. If you don’t then, you are on your own and need to reinstall from scratch. Thus, in this case the home directory needs to be backed up over the wire. One of the many ways to do this would be to tar up the directroy and secure copy it to an other machine. This can be done with the following commands: tar up home directory:
tar -czpf /tmp/my_home.tar.gz /home copy the file to another computer:
scp /tmp/my_home.tar.gz someuser@192.192.192.192:.6. The ham fest is coming.

7. Funny non technical books to help you laugh:
Dwayne’s Depressed
The boat that would not float.
Big Overeasy.
Operating Instructions.

8. Commercial kernel modules bring up an conflict in the Linux community.

More specifically, kernel modules are supposed to be open source. Thus, if you have a commericial kernel module it has to exist outside the scope of the Linux kernel tree. Many commercial organisations say that their software is compatible with Linux and provide commercial or kernel modules in binary format. These organisations are selling their products as Linux compatible, but their software only works with certain kernels. Using commerical binaries requires the system kernel to stay static. For example, one member purchased a $6000 commercial camera for his organisation because the vendor said it was compatible with Linux. After the purchase, the vendor provided him with a binary Linux Kernel like the Nvidia kernel patch. This patch runs some code and creates a kernel module that should be able to run. However, if the developer is a small shop they will not have the ablitity to keep up with the kernel changes. Thus, the customer will be forced to use an older kernel that was used to create the binary kernel patch. Although this is workable, many of the kernel developers do not like this. To the kernel developers, these organisations are not truely supporting Linux for thier devices are closed-source. The end-users get caught in the middle of this argument. This makes it infinatly more complicated to run commercial drivers under Linux.