Views and News from the Members

This week we are having the Digital Freedom night! The meeting will start at 7.30pm and finish at 8.45pm, at 9.00pm there will be an optional extra trip to the bar to continue discussions (they will throw us out at around 10pm).

The evening will consist of a 'round table' discussion, (actually there are lots of little square tables but you get the idea), where we will discuss 'digital freedom'. During this we will have some lightning talks to help seed the discussion. We will look at GNU Privacy Guard, which is a tool you can use to sign and/or encrypt your email, and we will hear about censorship and websites.

Bring biscuits if you can!

posted by: zeth at: 22:50 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

By popular request, we now have a planet.

A planet is a celestial body with gravity but not thermonuclear fusion. It is also a bit of software that aggregates changes to web pages that allow you to keep up with whats going on. It is easier to understand if you just click on the link.

If you are in the Birmingham area and have a blog or website that has an RSS, RDF or Atom feed showing latest changes, and you think it will be interesting to the members of Birmingham Linux User Group, then let us know about it.

You will need to provide the feed address and a Hackergotchi (photo). The photo needs to be 100x100 pixels in size and in .png format with a transparent background.

More info about making the photo can be found by reading the Hackergotchi entry in Wikipedia.

posted by: zeth at: 17:37 | path: /on-members-sites | permanent link to this entry

So, today saw a total lunar eclipse. In case anyone's interested, I took a few photos which can be found here. Enjoy.

Oh, and in case you thought this wasn't Linux related, all the processing was done using the GIMP and ufraw. All free software :-)

posted by: Pete Lewis at: 00:30 | path: /on-members-sites | permanent link to this entry

A fifteen minute part of this month's LUG meeting is now available to download! In "An Introduction to awk", Simon Stanford looks at this pattern scanning and processing language.

Here are the slides. You can download the original High Quality Ogg Vorbis file, or the automatically generated Low quality MP3 file.

posted by: zeth at: 18:04 | path: /meetings-and-reports | permanent link to this entry

This meeting will be a series of 4 to 5 mini-topics. Each topic will have up to 10 minutes of talking and five minutes of audience questions/interaction/interruptions. Topics will include:

• Quentin W - Some essential commands and utilities
• Simon S - Introduction to Awk
• Richard S - Joomla CMS install
• Zeth G - IRC and Blogging, SBLUG style
• Possibly one more to come, watch this space.

posted by: Zeth at: 12:04 | path: /meetings-and-reports | permanent link to this entry

Following on from my last post about the Ubuntu installer for Windows, prolific Debian hacker Robert Millan has created an installer for Debian but it seems to work slightly differently.

I do not have a Windows system close to hand so I have not tested it for myself, but the approach seems to be that you click on a link at goodbye-microsoft.com and it starts the Windows installer. This places the Debian installer on your hard-drive and asks if you want to reboot now. When you get back to the Windows Bootloader, an option is "Debian Installer".

This allows you to do a full network install. This means you can install on a system without a burning a CD, (which is especially good because not all systems have CD drives) and without changing the BIOS settings. All that is needed is the URL.

posted by: Zeth at: 11:47 | path: /installing-linux | permanent link to this entry

I just read about a new way to try out Linux aimed at Windows users. It is called install.exe (Note that link is to a wiki page called install.exe - it does not link directly to an executable) which is apparently based loosely on a concept from a distro called Topologilinux. It has been produced by a Californian guy called Geza Kovacs.

The idea is to install Linux (Ubuntu) by using the commonly used NSIS installer (first developed for WinAMP but used in many programs).

The installer downloads the relevant data and while in the foreground a progress bar ticks, in the background, the installer downloads a disk image using Bittorrent. You can then reboot straight into Linux, no CD burning required.

The Linux install, user data and swap are stored as .img files in the NTFS partition in a directory called C:\ubuntu. The process is completely reversible using a Windows uninstaller found from the normal location called "Add/Remove Programs".

I personally cannot see how there is not a small performance penalty by using the disk images rather than a partition, but it should be far faster than a LiveCD, and considering how unresponsive Windows can seem sometimes, it should still seem pretty fast.

It currently works on Windows XP (asd below?) but not on a fresh install of Vista because Vista does not use the boot.ini file, a computer upgraded from XP to Vista may well still work as it will probably chain boot Vista from the old bootloader. So it is not completely finished yet but a Working prototype and screenshots can be found here.

posted by: Zeth at: 00:05 | path: /installing-linux | permanent link to this entry

Recently discussed on the list is an episode of the Radio 4 programme 'in Business' which covered open-source on the 11th January. See the programme details, some members managed to 'listen again', some did not as ironically the program does not seem to work with open source software.

posted by: Zeth at: 00:01 | path: / | permanent link to this entry

A question posted to the mailing list was:

"If I wanted to go through a bunch of source code files and replace one string with another how could I do it with on the command line?"

The answer given by DG was:

set -x
set -e
for f in $(find . -name *.c)
do
sed 's/foobar/foo_bar_boo/g' < $f > $f.new
mv $f.new $f
done

A handy explanation given by CP was:

In case that isn't clear, put the above in a file and run it and it will find all files with names ending with .c and replace all occurrences of the string "foobar" with "foo_bar_boo".

posted by: Zeth at: 22:46 | path: /interesing-answers | permanent link to this entry

I submitted this blog to the technorati and BritBlog directories. The first was fine but BritBlog rejected us because they could not determine if we are British. What are we supposed to do? Sing the national anthem before the next meeting?

I've given up. Viva la France.

posted by: Zeth at: 22:35 | path: /odd-but-true | permanent link to this entry

Simon ('raetsel') has written his take of the last LUG meeting.

posted by: Zeth at: 09:15 | path: /meetings-and-reports | permanent link to this entry

On Thursday, Clive de Salis gave a talk entitled "a rough guide to making a home network with printing" where he explained the network that he had set up for a relation's home business.

Networking turned out to be an emotive topic, many contributions were given from the floor about the multitude of ways that a home network could be setup.

On the printing side, there was a communal expression of grief and sympathy at the various printing problems that people in the audience had experienced, from non-existent drivers to jammed printer heads; printing remains one of the biggest chores for those using computers.

I personally am still waiting for the 'IBM PC' style printer, i.e. one that is made of generic parts that can be replaced and maintained by the user.

After the meeting Clive kindly bought me a pint and explained that he he worked with dust explosions. Needless to say, when I got home I put my icing sugar in a sealed container.

posted by: Zeth at: 02:47 | path: /meetings-and-reports | permanent link to this entry

On the mailing list page, it specifies that you should use plain text email rather than HTML email. How do you do that?
Well Aaron Sloman maintains a page about how to do it.

posted by: Zeth at: 18:00 | path: /on-members-sites | permanent link to this entry

Any member of Birmingham LUG can submit a post to this blog, see here for instructions.

posted by: Zeth at: 18:00 | path: / | permanent link to this entry