Scott Dowdle's blog

Training materials for new users has been a topic of discussion lately... especially with the renewed claim that, "2008 will be the year of the Linux desktop" and the seeming rise of Ubuntu as a distribution for new users.

Judy recently wrote to us:

Learning Linux

I just wanted to thank, I believe it was Scott and Warren for turning me to Chess Griffin's Podacsts. I have listened to the first 12 so far and am understanding more with each one. Sometimes I have to listen to a podcast twice to get it. I am very computer illiterate, however I am beginning to understand some of the jibberish Ken used to talk about. Bodhi is doing an adult education class in January as well. With what I am learning from Chess will help me with that class.

Thanks again for you help and patience,
Judy

You are welcome Judy. Thanks to Charles Griffin for the Linux Reality podcasts. The rest of this posting deals with what training materials are out there and discusses an opportunity for us to give back to the Linux community.

The meeting is tonight. I got a few replies back from people who just wanted to meet at the MSU CS lab rather than the traditional meeting place and driving over.

For anyone who isn't familiar with the MSU CS lab location... and where to park, here's some basic instructions:

The Engineering and Physical Science (EPS) building is located at the corner of W. Grant St. and S. 7th Ave. The building is on the NE corner of the intersection. The place to park is on the SW corner of the intersection. There are several parking lots on S. 7th Ave. but the "Pay lot" is the north most one. That's where you want to park. At the time of the start of the meeting, you'll probably need to pull a ticket when entering the lot (or the arm won't come up to let you in)... but by the end of the meeting, the pay lot is closed and the arm is up so you can exit the lot freely.

The meeting room in the EPS building is on the second floor... room 259. I try to make sure the building is unlocked so no one has any trouble entering.

The topics for tonight's meeting are:

1) Howto record screencasts in Linux

and if anyone is interested

2) Creating and using desktop environments within OpenVZ virtual machines

The method used for remotely using the desktop environments also applies to non-virtualized use so if you'd like to know how to run KDE on a remote machine over ssh with the display coming up on your local machine... without using VNC, I'll show you how. VNC is also usable in both scenerios too.

Despite the poor weather, I hope to see you at the meeting.

Update from the day after the meeting: We had approximately 9 people attend the meeting so it went rather well... although I wasn't as prepared for my two presentations as I would have liked to have been. We also talked a lot about GNOME vs. KDE... did a little Ubuntu and Fedora bashing... talked about the HDHomeRun HD/Digital tuner box with Network output (which we hope to have demoed in Feb 2008)... and Linux in general.

Ken had ownership of both the BozemanLUG.org and HelenaLUG.org domains and controlled the websites and mailing lists. Oddly enough, the company that was doing the DNS and hosting of the BozemanLUG seems to be having some problems. Their DNS servers were unreachable this weekend but they appear to be back up now... but the hosting services have not come back online yet.

Ken was hosting the HelenaLUG stuff on a machine in his basement and that has gone away... but I did rsync it before it went offline.

Assuming the hosting service for BozemanLUG comes back to life in the near future, I'm going to try and gain access to the web DocumentRoot and rsync it, as well as get the list of email addresses that was on the mailing list and start a new list. If the hosting company doesn't come back online with the content and/or I can't gain access to the data, I'll just scrub a copy of the BozemanLUG site from the wayback-machine and manually use the email addresses I've collected over the years from various BozemanLUG members and start a new list.

Assuming we can get control of the HelenaLUG.org domain, that should be passed to Bodhi Zazen who appears to be the most active Linux user in Helena... who it appears will take over leadership of the HelenaLUG for the near future.

The memorial service was well attended. So far as I could tell there were approximately 6 LUG members (2 from Billings, 3 from Bozeman, and 1 from Helena). Of course Ken's family was there as was Judy's... and all of Ken's co-workers from Key Computer Consulting and many people from the motorcycle club Ken was a member of.

We started by signing the guestbook upon entry into the building. That was followed by heading up to the front table that had three posters full of pictures of Ken for a trip down memory lane.

The full story contains several pictures. See also the photogallery.

Warren, Bohdi, Scott, and DonnieDonnie Lunder and Warren Sanders (both from the BillingsLUG) picked me up about noon on their way to Helena. The reason we went so early, given the fact that the service wasn't until 6:30PM, was because we had a mission: 1) Gain access to all of Ken's computers, see what they are running, and save anything that needed to be saved, and 2) Go through all of Ken's computer related stuff and help get rid of everything so the family doesn't have to.

Ken DykeUpdate: A memorial service for Ken was held in Helena on Friday November 2nd. 2915 Country Club Ave., Helena.

Ken passed away Monday morning, October 29th. Please read comments for more information. See also this comment from Ken's brother.

A comment was posted early Sunday morning to the BozemanLUG book section of this site. Please have a look.

Ken Dyke founded the BozemanLUG back in the Spring of 2001. He also frequently attended BillingsLUG meetings.

Ken moved to Helena in 2005 and started up a HelenaLUG... and continued to drive to Bozeman each month to host the BozemanLUG meetings until I moved to the Bozeman area (Sept. 2005) and he handed over the reigns of the BozemanLUG to me. He has been attending the BozemanLUG meetings on and off since moving to Helena.

New: Found some additional pictures from an old website of Ken's archived by the Wayback machine.

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This is a little dated (January 2007) but I just ran across it today. It's yet another glimpse into the Linux Kernel Development process. I haven't watched it all yet so I'll leave additional comments for later.

If you didn't read the article, David put out a video.

Kir posted a blog entry regarding Andrew Morton's keynote from the LinuxWorld Expo 2007 keynote (from August as seen a few items below) wanting to get a transcript of what Andrew said about containers and OpenVZ... so I spent about 30 minutes making it so. Here's what Andrew said:

"The one prediction I am prepared to make... is that over the next 1 to 2 years there'll be quite a lot of focus in the Linux kernel on... the core of the Linux kernel... on the project which has many names. Some people call it containerization... others will call it operating system virtualization... other people will call it resource management. It's a whole cloud of different features which have different applications.