David Mandel's Teaching Linux and Linux System Administration as Distance Education Classes.

I arrived right as the talk was starting and during the first minute or so I am franticly setting up the camera. Sorry about that. There is quite a bit of interaction between David and several audience members who also teach Linux in an academic setting. I teach a Linux SysAdmin class myself and enjoyed this. It was on the later track on the second day so it was allowed to run a bit long. Enjoy.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-Teaching_Linux_via_Distance_Ed-David_Mandel.webm (361.4MB)

Deb Nicholson's Software Patents: What You Can Do.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-Software_Patents-Deb_Nicholson.webm (394.4MB)

Max Mether's High Availability for MySQL.

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LFNW2012-MySQL_HA_Solutions-Max_Mether.webm (304.6MB)

Will Sterling's Linux Logical Volume Manager Advanced Topics.

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LFNW2012-LVM_Advanced_Topics-Will_Sterling.webm (244.4MB)

Oscar Baechler's introduction to Calligra Krita

As you may be able to make out from the poster image, Oscar is running Krita on Microsoft Windows 7. He wanted to show the new 2.4 release and had trouble getting it for his preferred Linux distro and had to settle due to time constraints.

While Oscar is fairly new to Krita, he is a very skilled and experienced digital artist and didn't take long to adapt to it (1 week). With his Wacom tablet, he makes it look easy. Room conditions and video resolution / quality make it hard to see some finer details so make sure to have your own copy of Krita active so you can play with it as you watch, pause, watch this video.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-Krita-Oscar_Baechler.webm (307.5MB)

Larry Cafiero's Introduction to CrunchBang.

Direct link, right-click save as:
LFNW2012-CrunchBang-Larry_Cafiero.webm (280.8MB)

The reason BillingsLUG members Andrew and Warren were visiting the BozemanLUG meeting was because they are going to the LinuxFest Northwest 2012 show in Bellingham, Washington along with BozemanLUG member Gary Bummer and myself. Yeah, four people for the trip this year! Last year I was all by myself.

On the road again

Warren was kind enough to drive again this year. He is a "professional" and "ninja" driver. Andrew sat next to him in the front and Gary and I sat in the back. Gary and I watched two Big Bang Theory videos on my laptop along with the HBO movie Game Change. We also listened to the most recent episode of the Sunday Morning Linux review audiocast.

Visiting Psymin and Agethol

I don't know if I spelled Agethol correctly so forgive me if not. Speaking of spell checking, Firefox 12 doesn't seem to be doing while-you-type spell checking for me so I'm sure this post will be rife with typos. :(

One of the traditions that we do on the trip to LFNW if at all possible is to visit with Seth McClain and Frank in Missoula. We meet at Seth's favorite eatery, "The Shack". Seth yet again bought everyone a bruchy meal. I had oatmeal with fruit and it was delecious. Even with the long trip we stayed and talked geek talk for about an hour and a half. It was awesome.

It was also Seth's birthday. Happy birthday Seth! You are getting old like me dude. :) Thanks for the food and sorry we didn't bring the dirt and rocks from Manhattan that you wanted as posted on Craig's List (inside joke).

Arriving in Bellingham

When driving from Montana to the Northwest coastal region, you gain an hour. We arrived in Bellingham around 7PM. We stopped at our favorite hole-in-the-wall oriental food place and all had "Spicy Chicken". While I've been trying to cut back on my animal product intake this year, I couldn't resist. I'm a wimp when it comes to spicy stuff but this wasn't too hot and was very tasty... and on Fridays you get a can of soda with each meal FREE! :)

With our full bellies we went over to the Hampton Inn and checked in. Gary and I went over to the Fox Hall (part of Hampton Inn) for the last 30 minutes of a Job Fair event that was held as part of LFNW. We weren't looking for jobs or anything and were mainly fighting bordom... but they had some fruit kabobs and some finger veggies so I snacked a little bit and didn't even feel guilty about it.

Looking forward to day 1

There are many fine presentations scheduled. The Calligra Krita folks (as mentioned in BozemanLUG April 2012 Meeting Report) really wanted there to be a Krita presentation at LFNW and I believe one guy really familiar with Blender (and giving a presenation on it as well?) volunteered to show Krita off even though he is relatively new to it. The Krita folks mailed him a copy of the promotional training video DVD with physical comicbook included to be donated as a prize at the LFNW World Famous Raffle. I'm going to buy 20 raffle tickets in hopes of winning that and I'll definitely be attending (and hopefully video recording) the Krita presentation... along with all of the other presentations I attend... with the permissions of the presenters of course.

Here are the presentations I hope to attend:

• An Intro to CrunchBang
• Software Patents: What You Can Do
• Linux Logical Volume Manager Advanced Topics
• Help us get open source used in local schools
• ownCloud - Your Cloud, Your Data, Your Way!
• The LFNW World Famous Raffle
• Krita - Digital graphics for real artists
• XenClient: Client-side virtualization
• Meet Fedora: The Not-So-Miraculous story of a successful community
• Teaching Linux and Linux System Administration as Distance Education Classes

Isn't that list awesome? There are quite a few other (overlapping) presentations I wish I could attend and it was hard to settle on those. I hope to blog day 1 and day 2... although there might be some lag... and I'll be posting the videos ASAP after the event to archive.org in webm format.

Fedora Logo?The April meeting went pretty well. Attendance was better because Andrew N. and Warren Sanders were visiting from the BillingsLUG. Besides me, Andrew and Warren were regulars David Eder and Gary Bummer. A new guy showed up from Belgrade named Jethro. Unfortunately I didn't catch Jethro's last name nor get a picture of him but he participated quite a bit so I'm hoping he will make it to some future meetings. He has EMT training and is currently working on a motorcycle with a blown up engine.

GIMP

I talked about and showed GIMP 2.8 RC1 (as found in the Fedora 17 pre-release). I tried my best to highlight a few of the new features including of course the new Single Window mode. I briefly talked about the tentative roadmap GIMP has for the next two or three releases and mentioned the recent code sprint done by two GIMP developers that got ~ 90% of the work the project wanted to get accomplished for the next two releases (that usually take years) done in three weeks. GIMP is really a great program for editing and refining pre-existing images and I have been using it for more than 10 years... but it is obvious that GIMP still needs a number of long-time lingering feature deficiencies resolved before advanced users will be satisfied with it. They look well on the way to getting their in the next release or two.

Krita

Then I showed Calligra Krita 2.4 (again as found in Fedora 17 pre-release). I had a USB touch tablet input device (is that what you call them?) hooked up and showed off some of Krita's fancy paint brush stuff. I'm really new to Krita so I don't know what I'm doing yet... but it is so obvious how good of a program it is and I want to learn more. Just by doing some goofing around with the touch tablet it was clear that the quality of what you can create with Krita closely approximates what you can do with real paper, pencils, paints, etc. If I were had more artistic talents I think I'd be spending hours and hours with Krita just experimenting.

For about 10 years of my youth I collected comicbooks (Marvel, DC, and many independents like Cerebus) and one of Krita's use cases is in comicbook creation. Krita really excells in creating new artwork as opposed to working with pre-existing images and to help raise funds for future development one of the Krita developers has put together a series of 1080p webm videos on data DVD that show the creation of a color comicbook from start to finish. I hope to purchase that DVD (all content under a Creative Commons license) in the near future. I don't know if I'll actually get into creating a comicbook of my own but I can dream, can't I?

Fedora Artwork?

Speaking of art, some fine folks at the Fedora Project answered my plea for old Fedora branded install media and shipped me 19 lbs of old CDs/DVDs. Why would I want those? I like to decorate the walls at work (Computer Science Department at Montana State University Bozeman) with discs. With the help of everyone at the meeting, we used the optical media to create a new "artwork" for a previously blank and boring strech of wall in the main undergraduate computer lab (EPS 254). We did it very quickly and it still needs a little fine tuning, but the end result doesn't look too bad. We got a quick picture (thanks Andrew) but I'll probably post some better pictures when I get it fine tuned. I think the letter a at the end needs to be skooted to the left a little. Darn kerning.

Thanks for the help guys and hope to see some of you next month!

I downloaded the No Machine's NX 4 Preview 6 packages. They have server builds for Linux, Windows, and Mac. So far, I've only tried the Linux version but I hope to try the others soon.

So, what do I think? It is *AMAZING*. No really. I installed it on my work desktop and connected to it from my laptop at home over wireless. I adjusted the display quality down a bit because the combination of the bandwidth at work and the latency of my DSL connection at home are pretty bad. By the way, I connected to my pre-existing X11 desktop session and was able to share it. While the connection to my work desktop was rather grainy, it was VERY USABLE. I was able to watch video... and I'm even writing this blog post while I'm listening to a video... all running on the remote machine.

To really test it out, I opened up the spicec client on my remote work desktop and connected to a remote KVM virtual machine via the SPICE protocol and everything worked including sound with good A/V sync. What is amazing about this is that I've never been able to connect to a work machine via SPICE from home but NX allowed me to and it worked well even though I was running a remote display inside of a remote display.

All I can say is that this is the best remote session experience I've ever had with any protocol. This NX 4 Preview 6 works better and is more dynamically configurable than anything I've ever seen. If I'm able to stream a Windows desktop and a Mac Desktop with the same quality, in my opinion, NX is the protocol of the future... hands down.

Please forgive me for being so positive and optimistic... yeah, I've only been using it for about 30 minutes now... but wow... really... wow.

BTW, they have totally redone the user interface of the NXplayer application and it is much easier to use. Give it try for yourself. To clarify, this is definitely a preview release and there are some bugs, but what I've seen thus far has greatly impressed me.

Over the years I've used a number remote display products.

VNC

The first one I recall using was Virtual Network Computing aka VNC in 1998. VNC is free software and has been incorporated, forked and enhanced by a number of companies and projects. While VNC works rather well over a medium to high speed LAN, it can be a bit slow over slower connections. That is because VNC isn't a completely vector-based protocol and still uses mostly bitmaps... or at least that is my understanding. One good thing about VNC though is that both the client and the server are available for Windows, Mac, and Linux... and a few other things as well.

Let's examine a few alternatives.