BillingsLUG

The BillingsLUG folks got a call from the KULR8 people about wanting to visit their meeting last night and they did some interviews for a segment on the news broadcast last night. The full article can be found here. Here is the video of the segment in webm format. Feel free to download it and play it with your preferred video player if you have trouble playing it in your browser. VLC is recommended.

Download link: KULR8-Linux-20130117.webm (9.6MB)

While watching the video, don't forget to play, "Name that LUG member".

Larry (The Free Software Guy) Cafiero emailed the following today. As you may recall he is one of the organizers of SCALE who is helping us organize a Montana LinuxFest.

Hi, all --

After a discussion this afternoon on #ubuntu-montana, I proposed that we'd "reboot" the organizational side of Montana Linux Fest in order to get going again.

So this is it; the second "first" e-mail to get things rolling. Forgive me for letting any momentum we gained after Linux Fest Northwest slow down -- I take responsibility for this and hope we can get things rolling and keep it going until May.

But we're going to have to start from square one again, and please bear with me if these are pretty obvious questions and statements.

There was mention on the list of how this should be organized, and who should do what, etc. We'll get to that in a minute. What I need to know from those on this mailing -- and if you wish to put this on the Bozeman or Billings LUG lists, I'm OK with that -- is where we stand now.

When we left things, I think we had Billings in mind as a site. Is this still the case? If so, was there a particular facility in mind?

We are still looking at May, after Linux Fest Northwest and before Texas Linux Fest in June/July, correct?

As for an organizational set up, there should be committees (even if they are committees of 1 or 2) with responsibilities going forward: Technical committee, publicity committee, site committee, etc., each with responsibilities. For example, Tech would have responsibility for the networking and a/v aspect; publicity is fairly self explanatory, but could include assisting in getting folks invited to speak at the fest; site committee would be responsible for organizing the exhibit hall.

There are probably others, and I'm hoping Ilan, who has much more experience in this than I do, can jump in here and help out with what's needed, staff-wise.

In the meantime, I think we should have another organizational meeting soon -- Tuesdays seemed to be best last time. Would that work now? Or is there another day/time that works for everyone? With the exception of Friday mornings when I'm teaching Python or evenings between, say 9 and 10:30 Pacific Time (when I'm putting together the newspaper for which I work), I'm pretty flexible. Weekends are good for me, too.

I'd like to be able to meet sometime soon -- before next Tuesday -- and get things going again. So let's start by seeing what we have so far so we know what we need to do going forward.

Thanks,
Larry Cafiero

If there is any interest in a LUG in Billings this month please reply. My conference room is available each Thursday evening on the condition that there are a few people already planning on attending. rsvp. thanks

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Backups are something that are generally ignored until they are needed. Having good backups will save you much time and headache and maybe even money. Having had backups fail before and having to pay thousands of dollars to recover the data is an experience that I hope to never have again.

Virtualbox (http://www.virtualbox.org/) is a virtualzation platform. I use it to test out new Linux distributions as well as to run some limited tests of new software for customers. It can run on Linux or windows hosts and can run quite a few guest operating systems. Installation in Ubuntu is a snap. First enable the VirtualBox repo if you don't want to use the open source edition. Edit your /etc/apt/sources.list. I added this to mine for gutsy:

deb http://www.virtualbox.org/debian gutsy non-free


FreeNX is the free open source version of nomachine.org NX software. It is a VNC like program that tunnels over SSH and has compression to run well and at high resolutions over even slow internet links. This program has many advantages over the VNC protocol. The biggest is security, it is built into the program from the ground up. All connections are encrypted and tunneled over SSH by default with FreeNX. FreeNX is also faster by a huge factor over VNC this is a real plus on slow connections.

MediaMVPLately, I have had some fun with a Hauppauge MediaMVP 1000. It is a networked device that is able to receive video and audio steams and display them on your TV. It includes a remote control and once configured is very easy to use. What makes this device extra neat, is that it runs Linux with a few options available giving extra features. Be sure to attend this month's BillingsLUG meeting, when I give a demo of the MVP1000.

When it powers on, it actually loads its OS over the network. The fine people behind the MVP Media Center project have a quite nice replacement mini Linux Distro to get more out of the MVP 1000.

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For February's meeting, I will do a show and tell of this neat little device and we will go through the steps of setting up MVPMC and a Linux PC as a media server.