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I just wanted to jot some of these topics down so I could come back to them at some point... because they are all things I've done but haven't really documented well... or things I want or need to learn about.

Perhaps someone will find some of the topics interesting and initiate a fire under me so I'll get to them quicker... or perhaps someone will follow a link or two that is new to them and learn about something before I do... and share what they learn.

You know to click on read more link below for the rest, right?

I had fully intended to make the February meeting, so I could meet some of you, and perhaps learn something useful. (There is just so MUCH that I need to learn!) Unfortunately, as they say "stuff happens" and my best laids plans went awry as a result.

I just recently wrestled with my little smb setup here to tighten the grip on who might be accessing my share. My intention is to simply share my own smb share I have running in VmWare with my XP host. My XP host is logged into a domain server not to the local machine. The Linux I have installed in VmWare is FC5 running from USB drive and using the NAT networking setting. My company has blocked DHCP to only those machines authenticated with by the domain server. I originally used the KDE Control Center to setup my smb sharing homes.

No, this isn't a repeat blog posting... as I continually download and install various distros. Since I'm very Red Hat centric, I'm all excited about the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release... that is coming out... maybe in March?!?
[Update: Looks like next week... March 14th.]

Fedora 7 Beta 2

Fedora 7 betaDownloaded and installed Fedora 7 Test 2. Notice that Core is no longer part of the name because Core and Extras are in the process of being merged. I downloaded the LiveCD and it worked great. I was very impressed by the artwork. I did an install from the LiveCD and it worked well... and seemed faster than the boot-install method. The only things broken that I noticed were some warning messages during shutdown after doing the install... about not being able to unmount something... but it was of no consequence... and a few of the desktop apps didn't work... like Abiword for example. Other than that, it recognized the onboard Intel video chipset of my wife's Gateway branded box and worked with accelerated video... rotating cube and all.

For the rest of the story, click on the read more link below...

Daylight Savings Time in the US. Is it the end of the world again March 11th 2007? For most of us our Linux boxes will be just fine. The DST change has been fixed in most modern Linux Distros. But if you are still using your 2.4 kernel based ancient distro, you may want to look into fixing it. That isn't what this tip is about rather proof that your box is going to make the switch. You should see this when you run the zdump command below:

zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007

I am doing some research for Dr. Tang, a professor in the MSU Computer Science Department. He wants to find an optimal set of channels for a wireless mesh network for some networking metric. Some common metrics are Quality of Service (QoS), throughput, and latency. Of course any algorithms he wants to try out require testing in the simulation environment we use, called OpNet. OpNet is an unweildly beast, and I spend most of my time wrestling with it. The hard part is that for his research, Tang wants each node to have multiple radios. The simulator really doesn't like that.

This is my first blog post ever! I came to this weeks LUG during a very busy week because I didn't want to miss David Boreham presenting. I have a lot of respect for him ever since I interviewed with him to work at his company, Bozeman Pass Inc. I didn't get the job, but I did get to spend four hours learning things from him. I think he is a very wise man. I also needed to give him his book back. I've been holding on to On Intelligence for some time.

Just wanted to thank David Boreham again for the presentation he did on Fedora Directory Server. 15 people (including myself and David) attended the meeting... which is the highest turnout we have had in a very long time... although I believe we easily have the potential for 3 times that number. I *SHOULD* have brought a camera and taken a few pictures but I didn't.

Birth of LDAP

David started off the presentation by explaining that quite a bit of the most recent development work on FDS (aka Red Hat Directory Server) was actually done here in Montana... by David and people who work for him. It was incredibly interesting to have an actual developer give a presentation and David has a long history in the industry and was able to give us a first-hand introduction into the birth of the ITU's X.500 protocol and how it was later scaled down and adapted to work over TPC/IP as LDAP by Tim Howes of the University of Michigan.

David then explained what LDAP was good for and what it wasn't so good for.

History of Fedora Directory Server

Since FDS is the continuation of the product formerly known as Netscape Directory Server and was aquired by Red Hat on June 1, 2005, David went over some of the history of the product and where it stands today.

For the rest of the story, click on the read more link below...

Short and sweet. Just discovered this trick. In KDE (currently using 3.5.4 FC5) if you move your mouse over the kpanel with more than one application running and over the apps or desktop area... you can use the scrolly mouse wheel to cycle through your apps. from all your desktops. An alternate keyboard method is with Alt+Tab/Ctrl+Tab but those will only alternate between apps. in the current desktop.

Friday I decided to finally get caught up with the latest Gaim IM. I'm using FC5 most of the week while at work. I had been using the latest stable 1.5 RPMs. The past couple weeks for me have been a hassle with requests for authorization and tons of spam/bots from foreign lands. For some reason my privacy setting would never stick for ICQ and MSN accounts. Even if I set them for the current session, the spam bots seem to get through still. Who knows!