I'm from Billings originally and was just wondering if the Masters still live on 907 Kale Dr.

Joe

Well gang it has been awhile, I have missed alot of meetings, I hope to catch the October meeting. I ve been busy coding security patches for a few servers at school. Also playing around with a BSD server at school. Hope to see you at the next meeting. :) Keep up the good work Warren, and Scott. The Minutes are great to have, especially if you miss a meeting. :)

I know it's been a long while since I have produced the minutes from the meetings. I will do the minutes as long as I have time and interest. I don't know did anyone even miss them?

Sorry if you didn't get a reminder this month. We had a slight glitch on the YVLUG mailing list and only others in Scott's To: field got the message. It was great to see Scott Huck and his boys again!

This month we ventured into (risking your interests) showing a movie! Still having some time at the end of the movie (perhaps going over a little) for actual Linux talk. It was also hard not to talk about the events of the past week. I learned a lot about fellow members' opinions.

The movie was Startup.com, a documentary of two childhood best friends trying to strike it rich with the Internet dot-com frenzy. A human drama of love, hate, greed, frailty, adventure and betrayal. Well it was really just about money. What I learned was that I don't have what it takes to start or run this type of business. I along with many friends would only be the techi guys these businesses would want to hire.

Besides the movie, we did have some YVLUG business to mention; some talk about coordinating efforts to advertise our annual Install Fest coming this November. As time goes I can keep you up to date. Look for an InstallFest category on MontanaLinux.org.

There was lots of mentioning of the Web Developer Cert. program at Rocky Mtn. College.

Some relation to the terrorist event and their communications. See The encryption wars have begun.

Thin Client networks. (Possibly next month's topic)

Please keep Kevin in your prayers. Get well soon!
Thanks to all that showed up! See you next month?

First off I want to thank Kevin Nathan for bringing in his SUSE 7.1 Penguin box. He demonstrated several programs such as YAST. He has a very cool looking penguin case as well. Maybe he could post a link where he got that?

Before the meeting Scott and Brock compiled a very slick demo of Cal3D:

Cal3d is a skeletal based 3d character animation library written in C++ in a platform-/graphic API-independent way. Originally designed to be used in a 3d client for Worldforge, it evolved into a stand-alone product which can be used in many different kinds of projects.

From what I gathered on their conversation during the compile, you need to guide it to several local libraries. The configure script is not totally foolproof.

Next was a demonstration on spawning new X window sessions within the current. This allowed us to preview other window managers such as Gnome or Sawfish in separate window displays in the current running manager. Here is a brief description from Brock:

man Xnest is about the only reference I know of... Here's my brief summary:

>From in an Xterm, (or KDE run box, etc ) you simply run: (something like)

Xnest :1 -query localhost

Here's a breakdown of the args::1 means use screen 1, so to run a program onto this nested session, you would use something like:

DISPLAY=localhost:1

Each display needs a unique number, but you can have as many as you like.

-query localhost means to query for a XDMCP server on localhost, and connect to it if you can. This is querying for an XDM server (or kdm, or gdm) running at localhost. You can also try these other options:

indirect localhost will bring up a chooser generated by localhost of all the XDMCP servers available that it can see on your network.

broadcast will simply broadcast over the network and connect to the first server it finds, likely, localhost.

We had 9 attendees at the meeting. The mentioned unofficial (ogg/mp3) copy of the book "Just For Fun", also the latest from RMS's and an older one from Larry Wall on Pearl all on one CD-R was given away as the door-prize. Meeting adjourned at approximately 9:30PM.

Lastly; if you have an idea or wish to see list, or you would like to do a presentation, please let us know. Any ideas or takers for the June meeting?

After being away for last months YVLUG meeting and neglecting to write up minutes for February, I'm back on track.

Many thanks to our guests this month from the Bozeman LUG, Ken and Sherri! Glad you could make it over at the expense of driving time and fuel. Scott and I may plan another trip to Bozeman next week; still not determined.

We actually stayed on the topics this time! Not that it's a bad thing to stray, but we also covered others as usual. There were a grand ten attendees. Starting at about 7:30PM to 9:45PM.

A must read link mostly covered at the meeting was http://Xiph.org/about.html on the Xiphophorus site. This covered the Ogg Vorbis topic.

A recap if you have not read about our trip to Denver last month for the Colorado Linux Info Quest can be found on MontanaLinux.org.

There was a quick install over the projector of the latest Red Hat 7.1 release. Some discussion on this again at MontanaLinux.org.

As we had guests from the Bozeman LUG, we talked about what they are doing over there next week at their LUG meeting. Again, see the announcement on MontanaLinux.org.

There were Linux bumper stickers handed out and a 3 CD set of the latest Red Hat 7.1 given away as a door prize. See what you're missing?!

This months topic of the 2.4 Kernel was presented by Brock Williams (thank you). Not to stop there, thanks again (Brock) for the meeting facilities at Cottonwood Computer Solutions.

There were 8 attendees at the meeting. Starting time was roughly 7:45 PM due to my distraction of asking for some assistance from Brock on a filtering log error of mine. Sorry... Scott was running late. ;-)

Brock also went through some of the major enhancements of the 2.4 Kernel which can be found at: LinuxToday. As we have found, there aren't much of difference in other compiles of the Kernel. Just smells better...

We were in for a treat this month! Brock threw in a second topic (maybe out of the blue?) on Zope. Zope is a web application server that works in a team collaborative atmosphere. What I mean is, several people can work on a site simultaneously. This is all web front-end administered. A big PLUS for a lot of us!

Following the presentation topics were the usual "what's happening in the Linux world" discussions, along with my donations of bumper stickers from LinuxMall. (Oh well, messed up a shipment of mine.)

All went very well, as the departure time showed, approximately 10:15 PM

This months meeting is scheduled to be by Nicholas Henke. A junior at the University of Pennsylvania, studying computer and telcom engineering. He is currently working on a large Linux cluster there at the school. He is planning to be in town the day of our meeting, and there will be a backup plan if there are traveling time problems.

Nicholas plans to talk about his projects going on back in Pennsylvania. The backup plan will be on SSL installation and usage.

Meet us this Thursday, December 21st at Cottonwood Computer Solutions, located in Broadway Place at 207 N Broadway on the Mezzanine. Meeting time is set for 7:30PM.

This months meeting was short, as was the attendance. All five hard core LUGer's. Still no word from the presenter, but with luck we will have him back another day.

So we were left with our backup plan of the SSL discussion. Well if you listened close you may have heard the topic mentioned. :) Yes there is a very long command line in starting the Apache SSL.

Most of the discussions were of the troubleshooting nature. As always, feel free to ask us your Linux questions. Also feel free to ask them on the YVLUG e-list.

Happy Holidays everyone!

This months meeting put MontanaLinux.Org in the spotlight! Well... the web site construction anyway~

The last minute topic went very well! Thanks again Scott! We can always count on Scott to come up with a topic for the meetings. Last month we had a couple interested in doing something but I'm not sure what happened with that. With the weather and road conditions, and a change in the meeting location, it was difficult to make it to the meeting for some. So a big thanks to those who made it! Also want to welcome another new (member?) visitor, Dianna! Thanks for coming to the meeting.

6 of us were at hand and the meeting dispersed about 9:30.

Topic was: PHP-Nuke

• Went over the basic distribution extraction to the web backend setup.

• System requirements (apache (or other web server), php-mod, php, and myql is all)
• Described the administration parts and pieces (lots of features)
• Then just a tad bit on our goal (to involve all Montana LUGs and Linux consultants)

We tried getting some insider info on Gateway. Dianna works for the local Gateway Computer Store here in Billings. She was informing us they have or will have a Linux system on display. I only heard small rumors of this AOL distribution; it will be interesting to see. So stop out to see Dianna at the Gateway store and maybe she can show you this.

Another small discussion on the Atari and Amiga. Gateway had purchased Amiga a while back and has been doing something new with it. Seems that it may not have all the same glitz Amiga once had though. FYI you can get more info on Atari at: AtariNews.org (Yet another PHP-Nuke site).

A must attend meeting in December is in the works! The date by my calendar would be December 21st, 2000. This may change being so close to Christmas, but will keep you posted. We have a person who would like to do a presentation and hopefully a demo on Linux clusters and parallel programming. He may be available at that time in December. Stay tuned for further details, and tell a friend. See you next month!

UPDATE:

The meeting WILL BE HELD AT ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLLEGE. Where? In Alden Hall, room 004 which is in the basement. Luckily, there is an online campus map. I'd recommend traveling North down 17th, crossing Poly and turning right (East) into the parking lot. Alden Hall is the 2nd building on the North side of the parking lot. Room 004 is at the opposite end of the hall from the room we used to meet in way back when.

This is for this meeting only.

Hope to see everyone there!

Please find the InstallFest flyer on-line and distribute to friends. Sorry but I only included it in pdf. It is just over 1MB for better print quality reasons (300dpi).

Hey, I was wondering about the Quake II Tourmanant, who wants to play it, we will have the shareware version to install on your linux box if you wish to play with the others who want to play, email dowdle@montanalinux.org, and let him know what you want to play, so we have an idea, of what is going on.

Toby Schmidt

Do you think we could have a card next to the boxes that are demonstrating apps.? Having some key features of the app and what-not. Also some boxes playing some videos of Linux stuff in a loop. Don't know if it is possible, but to record some keystrokes, pulling up stuff and using some apps to play back in a loop. Have lots of machines doing stuff for display or
trial like a convention!

Any more ideas?

Please head on over to MontanaLinux.Org for the lates on the InstallFest discussions.

Got another mind full of Linux geek techno-jargon/gadgetry talk. How about you? These types of meetings are hard to recall everything to report back in the minutes. Suppose I should start taking notes.

We had a great turnout this month! Thanks again for coming. Hope the array of topics we discussed doesn't scare anyone off. Also want to welcome John and Darren to the group.

12 were in attendance and we closed about 10 PM.

• No topic was officially announced but we all did just fine ad-libbing. Plenty to discuss as usual.
• Starting off with a look at the Indrema Center. "A revolutionary product built on a revolutionary operating system, Linux" for TV, for game addicts, for total entertainment... playing unbelievably realistic 3D games, browsing the Net at high speed, or just enjoying personal TV or MP3 favorites.
• IMO the majority of the meeting fell back to the Red Hat 7's release and the rumors pros and cons. One great come-back to some of the talk form Bob Young is here at /. "The next slashdotter who compares anything Red Hat does to Microsoft will be punished. The punishment will be to find the nearest blackboard and write "freedom & personal responsibility good, serfdom & tyrannical control bad" seven hundred times."
• More discussion on Linux security.  I personally have strengthened my on box since last meetings discussion.  Again, check out "Securing and Optimizing Linux: Red Hat Edition.. at http://www.linuxdoc.org/guides.html.  Scott D. brought the latest Maximum Linux  which came with a CD with 600MB+ of Linux security apps.  I am planning to put some of these to good use this weekend.
• Took a look at some links at HackerWhacker.  Some advice, feel free to use the one-time free service but after that, learn how to use nmap.
• Touched base on that :CueCat thing again to those that missed the September meeting.  Scott D. added that they plan to have you hook up a link from your TV to your sound card to pull up web sites of the prospective adds on TV from sound signals.  See the November issue of Linux Journal.
• Still monitoring the latest greatest in the high bandwidth companies hopefully coming to Billings soon.
• Looked into some apps for the Quicken replacement.  I asked about the alternatives on this and will soon be testing several out.  Maybe I will demo one in the future.
• Made plans for next months annual install-fest/demo/gaming tournament.  YES I said game tournament!  Hopefully this will spark a very large interest to our gaming community.  There was not enough interest in the seminar idea at this time, maybe next year?
• Linux Journal  (November) came with a standalone magazine Embedded Linux Journal.  Lots of excellent embedded Linux system uses.
• We had an official Red Hat 7 two CD set and a downloaded three CD set including the powertools for a drawing.  Congrats to Brian and Scott H.  Remember to get the latest updates from Red Hat asap.  They also have a patched boot image to fix the anaconda loader during install.  I had that problem fixed with the boot image.

For those interested, the Montana Java User Group (MT JUG) is meeting on Thursday, November 9th at Cottonwood Computer. The meeting will cover the basics of the Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) development platform.

Thanks to our sponsor Cottonwood Computer Solutions for supplying the time and space.  The game room was great by the way!  Very cozy and better acoustics.  Awesome!

See you at the 3rd Annual YVLUG InstallFest (Demonstrations/Game Tourney) November 12th at Broadway Place.  Then again for the monthly YVLUG meeting November 16th.  Topic is TBA, we have several ideas brewing.

We also need to discuss whether we are going to have the annual install-fest and if so what plans to make it better. Maybe have a demo/game tournament/install fest? Seems that the seminar interests went ca-puts.

Would also like to encourage others to bring their boxes in if your having trouble getting it up and running. We need to do what ever it takes to promote new users starting with our own members.

later, later

Having had such a nice above average temps this month, then having a sudden change in weather day of our monthly meeting seems to have caused a major drop in attendance. This month we had a grand total of 7. Thanks for making it to the meeting despite the weather.

As planned there were three topics discussed:

• :CueCat .. The infamous bar-code scanner available at no cost from your local Radio Shack for a limited time. There are also other ways to receive the scanner besides Radio Shack by subscribing to particular magazines. Info on what was discussed at the meeting can be found on a couple columns in the Linux Advocate (97, 98, and 99). By Scott Dowdle.
• Everything you ever wanted to know about Unix passwords and more.. Very informative information and great advice about passwords and how you should be picking passwords and for what reasons. This was a presentation originally by Marc Merlin and re-presented at our meeting by Scott Dowdle. Find this online at http://marc.merlins.org/linux/PasswordTalk/
• KDE 2.0 Features .. A progress report on the KDesktop Environment. Also some information on what is new and changed with KDE. This was another presentation previously done by another author, created on Fri Aug 11 2000 by Kurt Granroth and presented at this months meeting by..mE! Warren Sanders. A couple links to find my resources were: http://devel-home.kde.org/~granroth/LWE2000/index.html for the slides. Final Beta of KDE Desktop Available for Linux®, and Pre-2.0 KDE progress report.

Also discussed was Linux security. Seems to be a major topic these days especially with the DSL and Cable connections out there. We find that most Linux distros. come pre-configured with many ports left open to hackers. Learn how to keep up on the latest. Start with some of these resources: find "Securing and Optimizing Linux: Red Hat Edition.. at http://www.linuxdoc.org/guides.html (a MUST have), "Armoring Linux" at http://www.enteract.com/~lspitz/linux.html. Once you think you have secured your box to the hilt, check out HackerWhacker for a slew of tests to be performed on your system and get feedback as well.

Meeting ended at approximately 9:45PM. Thanks to Cottonwood Computer for the space and working systems to present on.

See you next month, October 19th for another geek session.

This is Konqi the KDE dragon's girlfriend

Also demonstrated at the meeting will be the :Cue:Cat barcode scanner which can be gotten from your local Radio Shack. You must purchase something from Radio Shack so they can ring up your free :Cue:Cat... a battery will do.

Need Linux software to use your :Cue:Cat? No problem. Feel free to download it from HERE.

Another fantastic web page with :Cue:Cat hacker info can be found HERE. Make sure to follow the links at the bottom of the page.

You can even use your :Cue:Cat scanner from THIS web page.

I think it is way cool and it can even be used in your own programs.

See you at the meeting.

Opps, that "HERE" up above should have been a link but I had a typo in my HTML. So much for my webmaster skills sometimes. :)

Anyway, here's what it should have said...

Another fantastic web page with :Cue:Cat hacker info can be found HERE. Make sure to follow the links at the bottom of the page.

Earlier this month Scott Dowdle and I were talking about "just skipping" having a LUG meeting this month. I'm glad he didn't, as I predicted it could have been the death of the group. As it turned out, we had a much needed return of our average attendance. Good to seem some old faces again (Scott H. Brad, and Larry) and a new one as well (David S.). Thanks to Larry and Brock for sharing the products handed out at the meeting. If you missed the meeting, you may still be in luck to get some freebies, talk with Brock or Larry. We almost closed about 9:30 but had an unplanned item come up for discussion with the start of planning of the next install fest/information quest seminar. If you would like to participate in the planning of this event, please drop Scott or Brock an email.

Here are most of how the meeting went:

• "Evolution of Linux" documentary/Linux Expo and the IBM commercial and also a nicely done animation from User Friendly
• Touched on embedded systems such as the wrist watch and the MachZ integrated chip
• What really happened to the LinuxCare CEO and how they are doing now
• Free hand outs - Caldera Linux Technology Preview and SuSE 6.4 evaluation. Thanks to Caldera and SuSE!
• Telephony applications such as the DialPad (sadly only on windows java), and Net2Phone (once again only on windows)
• The embedded video camera ready to go with web server and all
• Search engines and well I still use Google
• MCN now using all Linux servers!
• Linux office suits - Star Office
• What the heck is XML again?
• GNOME vs. KDE and the future of GNOME
• Poor old SCO/Caldera - the big deal
• Sadly the end of VAX as they phase out
• Finally the LUG members plan for next install-fest/information quest

Great to see everyone again!
Come join us again next month, some time, same place...

Well, I thought it was a cool meeting. Everyone who attended the meeting got one of the Caldera Linux Technology Preview packages from Brock and several people took home evaluation versions of SuSE (either Intel or PowerPC). I took home the full version of SuSE 6.4 and installed it. In fact, I'm using my new setup to type this from. I'm not decided on SuSE yet. :)

We DID NOT cover MySQL at the meeting. Instead I played quite a few .mpg, .rm, and .avi movie files I had collected earlier in the week including IBM's "IBM Supports Linux 100%" commercial and various pieces of the upcoming "Evolution of Linux" documentary.

After the movies we talked about everything under the sun including the possibility of some sort of Linux show. We discussed an Installfest but decided that it would be a good idea to have a Seminar of some sort and try to make it as upscale as possible. Several of us (Larry, Brock, Warren and I) are going to have a meeting later to try and nail down some details.

Hopefully Warren will post more post meeting minutes later in the week. It is way past my bed time.

Hope to see everyone at the Sept. Meeting!

We got a shipment of about 20 Caldera Linux Technology Preview Boxed sets in the mail a week or so ago that anyone is welcome to if they'd like. Perhaps if we have some time at the meeting, we can install it and play with it a bit (or I'll install it somewhere beforehand so we can just play :). It's pretty sweet, really, as it has the latest 2.4 test kernel, the latest KDE 2.0 snapshot, some new Java stuff from Sun (JDK 1.3 I think). Anyway, KDE2 is slick and quite pretty. Should be fun.

Free stuff from SUSE! A bunch of demo CD's and one full retail boxed set

Larry Dillon

Thanks Scott for the Webmin presentation! Very informative and in a real world, working situation. Many may find that Webmin is very powerful, and possibly more so than the traditional linuxconf panel we all know and love. This installs in minutes and is user friendly. May be too much a user friendly application. A great alternative to manually editing individual configuration files. And done locally or remotely! By default if you plan to use this remotely, it is not secure, but can be made secure. The link to the Webmin site can be found above.

Another topic we talked about and showed was VNC. Find your linux installs here. Virtual Network Computing is here: http://www.uk.research.att.com/vnc/ This application is used to administer other systems remotely. Similar to PCAnywhere.

Other topics included: the usual ISP's, DSL/ADSL/etc., NIC /Internet appliances, bad modem deals, even the US Government!

This month we cut loose a bit earlier than normal at about 9:30pm. Another note to mention to those who plan to come to future meeting; there is FREE parking in the parking garage East of Broadway place and if you park on the third level, you can access Broadway place via the sky bridge there. Also it is unlocked! We continue to have problems with security locking the front door at about 7:15pm. So keep this in mind.

Thanks again to those who come to show their support and interests. Linux still has a rather small community and NOW is the time to learn about the future of computing.

Hope to see you next month!

Once agagin I forgot a notable item from the meeting. After the Webmin presentation, we talked about hacking up Netscape to fix/set preferences. I even said I would post this link and forgot to do so yesterday. So hack away with the recources from this site: http://people.redhat.com/scoile/fonts/fixing.html

As scheduled this month we discussed PHP.The Personal Home Page tools.

PHP is a server-side, cross-platform, HTML embedded scripting language. If you are completely new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, have a look at the Introductory Tutorial. Once you get beyond that have a look at the example archive sites and some of the other resources available in the Links section.

To some this may have been a bit boring if you..re not interested in creating web pages or programming. The presentation went rather smooth there Scott! Thanks for that.

The presentation was that of another presentation Scott D. and I attended in Colorado. It can be found at: http://php.chek.com/cliq/. Keep in mind that PHP4 is now out as the presentation was written before April 2000.

As with the programming discussions we also talked about databases with PHP and using them or.. heck, not using them. Funny stuff.

Talked about secure shell software and secure connections applications for Windows. With that we got into Aureate/Radiate Spyware. No this is not hacking applications but, well being hacked basically. For more information with this see: http://grc.com/optout.htm It was rumored that a SSH app for Windows, Penguinet, may be into this Spyware stuff.

We also touched in again on Mandrake with its latest 7.1 release. I have been having some fun with this one. Check it out, try it.

Thanks to those who participate! See you next month.

We have a topic for the meeting: PHP

For those that don't know what PHP is, it is a scripting language used for creating dynamic webpages. To find out more about PHP just visit the PHP website at: http://www.php.net

Warren and I got to hear Rasmus Lerdorf talk at the Colorado Linux Info Quest back on April 1st. Rasmus is fantastic speaker.

I'll be using Rasmus' slides from the CLIQ show as source material for the PHP Presentation.

PHP is supposedly used on more than 2,000,000 websites these days. I've been using for a couple of months now and it is pretty easy to use. Anyone interested in making dynamic (rather than static) webpages should be interested in this topic.

Hope to see everyone at the meeting.

Hi, y'all! Just gonna put in my two cents worth here and ask for a discussion (need not be entire meeting, just enough to get us newbies up to speed) on security, Read/Write/eXecute permissions (proper use!) and setting up efficient groups. Also, maybe Scott can touch on the enhanced(?) permission bits that Red Hat has embraced as of about 6.1 -- I remember reading a little about them in Red Hat's book but haven't seen any other discussion of them.

For another short topic, maybe touch on how to restore your system after a power failure, for those of us unable to afford a UPS at this time. What should we have prepared and a check list of what needs to be looked at/done.

Another general question: does anyone know if ANYONE is planning to support parallel port tape drives, or will I need to write my own driver -- and if so, what's the best source for learning all the hairy details of drivers and loadable modules, etc.?

Thanks for listening! (And with any luck this weekend, this will be the last post I make anywhere from a Windoze box!) Later, guys and gals . . .

Kevin,

That was a lot of stuff there. Sure, we can cover file permissions. I'm not aware of anything special that Red Hat has done with permissions though. I have a slide on file permissions that you can at the following URL:

File Permissions

Regarding parallel port devices... I know there is a lot of support for them in the 2.2.x kernel series but not having any external parallel devices, I haven't had the need or opportunity to check them out. The only thing hooked up to my paraport is my printer. :) The homepage of the parallel driver development effort is:

External Parallel Port devices and Linux

As far as writing your own device driver (not that I've done it before), I'd recommend the fantastic O'Reilly book:

Linux Device Drivers

I have a copy of it if you want to borrow it. I bought it at Barnes and Nobles some time ago and I don't know that I've seen it on their shelves for a while.

Regarding what to do if your system ever comes up with the single user mode bash prompt telling you that you need to fsck the filesystem because it wasn't shut down properly and may have some damage... just fsck the device. I've run into it about 3 or 4 times in the five and a half years I've been using Linux. I haven't had a real disk problem other than when I had a drive just plain go bad on me. We can talk about that if you like.

I'd like to recommend that you take up reading my rather humble online column called simply "Linux Advocate." Not an original name but I've been doing it for a while and the next column with be #90. You can find it at the following URL:

http://linuxadvocate.b-squared.net/

You can partake in the discussion system that I slapped up there yesterday... needs some testing. :)

Hope to see you at the next meeting!