Rock River Linux Users Group - Past Meetings

03/17/2006 There was 20 people in attendance at tonights meeting. Josh Stone started the evening off with a great discussion and demonstration of the graphics program, Blender. This was the first time we've really had a graphics program discussed at a meeting. Thanks for your efforts Josh. Great Presentation.

Dean Irvin followed with a thoroughly detailed presentation on using Icecast for setting up a streaming media server, There was a couple of issues that prevented the complete demo from working, but it was very informative. In the end, we hope to be able to use Icecast and possibly irc for a simulcast of future lug meetings. Currently, this is still in the planning stage. Thanks Dean, excellent presentation.


02/17/2006 There were 16 people attending. Tonight was the 8 month strategy session to help determine events and discussions the group would like to see presented.


01/20/2006 There was 15 people in attendance. Tonight was just an open Q&A session for the group. Any and all questions were presentated to the group for discussion.


12/16/2005 There were 15 people in attendance. Tonight Sam Williams completed his discussion on using subversion for file version control. Sam gave several demonstrations including how to set up a repository, practical uses of a repository, and what different types of methods can you use for accessing the repository. Sam Williams gave a demonstration on how to select, load, and install themes and extensions for the firefox browser.


11/18/2005 There were 16 people in attendance. Sam Williams provided the first in a two-part discussion on Subversion. Tonight we discussed all the different, practical applications beyond just source code control for program development. Sam Williams gave a demonstration on the new collaboration suite soon to be released as Open Source by Zimbra. Highlights were discussions about how an ajax-based application can give more of a desktop application feel to a browser based application.


10/21/2005 There was approximately 18 people in attendance. We had to events planned tonight. The first was a presentation by KR Foley on Myth TV. Unfortunately, the presentation had to be canceled at the last minute due to equipment failure. The remainder of the evening was spent in an installfest.


09/16/2005 Mike Urbanski gave a great presentation tonight on using firefox as a development platform. He focused on the use of XUL and Javascript to demonstrate the rudiments of a custom toolbar application that he had created.

07/15/2005 Tonight we had about 17 people show up. There were no scheduled presentations this evening. It was still a very interesting meeting. We had some general Linux conversations then afterward everyone retired to Hooters for a little more fun and discussions.

06/17/2005 Tonight was Installfest night... Cathy Sutton brought in a 550MHz PIII and with the help of Dean et.al. installed SuSE 7.2 Again a couple of small hard drives less than 5GB each. Cathy has an ultimate goal of creating a computer cluster with her older machines. Joe has a similar goal. Hopefully, they can organize a project together to address this mutual interest. Perhaps a presentation is in the air. One of our newer members brought in a Shuttle computer, but forgot to bring a keyboard. Might make a good comment on one of the pictures if you post them. I don't think he did much with it other than copy some of iso images after Cathy was finished and could borrow her kb. We did talk a little about Dyne:Bolic as he is interested in Linux video editing software. The young man in front of him with the see-through tower was interested in audio apps. Talked about audacity, Jack, and a few other apps. He wants to do some audio editing. He was teased about spending more money on the case then whats inside... All in good fun. We adjourned to Hooters for a bite to eat and a few (maybe more) drinks. Gary also reported he is now on broadband thanks to Wes (signalblast). Hooter girls seem to have problems counting beyond 2 (big surprise) and finally slid two tables together to accomodate 7 people. I think the odd number was the problem. Our first waitress left about half way through our stay, her replacment was alot of fun. Turn-out was a little light. The "Taste of Rockford" was in full swing at the entrance to the college. I guess in retrospect, this might have been a bad night for a meeting.

05/20/2005 Tonight we had a great meeting. There were close to 20 people in attendance and for the first time in RRLug history we had two presenters that were under 22 years of age. The evening started off when Josh Nerius gave a pretty exhaustive demonstration of the cooler features of MacOSX. It was very interesting. Josh discussed cool tools like Dashboard, iDvd, and garageband. Josh even went a little further and demonstrated a little of a piano composition he was working on with a midi keyboard and his laptop. Our finally presentation came from Mike Urbanski who discussed the history of Mono. He also went into an informative discussion regarding why Mono is important as a cross-platform development environment. Mike went out on a limb next.... In the slightly over an hour that his presentation lasted, he was also able to build a functioning web browser. Extraordinary work Mike!

The only thing that must be reitereated was the uniqueness of the presentation topics and how well each individual did. I was very pleased to see the enthusiasim and the presentations were both very well received... Thanks guys!

04/15/2005 We had about 15 people in attendance tonight. We had one presentation scheduled, but the presenter was detained at the last minute and was unable to come. In the end we had a good evening with discussions about Life, The Universe, and Linux. It was a fun time as usual. Afterwards several of the group went to Hooters to complete the night...

03/18/2005 There was a good turnout tonight for the installfest. In total we had about 17 people at one point. The number is about what we would normally expect, but while there are some people that aren't interested in an installfest and did not show up, they were replaced by others who were interested. We had 4 successes. There were two with Cathy Sutton, using extremely modest hardware. In the end she got a 4 year old version of Suse installed. Gary Melvin got Fedora Core 3 after a great number of hardware problems. Dean completed an install on one of his machines. During the meeting a series of questions were generated that are being answered on the email list. It was a good meeting and one that will pave the wave for future events of this type. John Jamont was kind enough to take some pictures of the event... I included three below. Thanks John!!


What incredible brain power all focused in one spot....


What could KR be looking for.....


Oh no Gary Lost another cd-rom drive during the install....

02/18/2005 Tonight we had a pretty good turn-out. We had about 16 people with 3 of the regulars missing because of illness or work related events. Barry Quigley  gave a presentation on using Cygwin and Vnc. Brief, but information. He also demonstrated VMware 4.0 for the group. John Jamont discussed the tool "xvidcap" for creating video screen captures. It is a pretty neat tool and the resulting file isn't that large for the size and duration of the file. You can also attach an audio track to the video for creating easy to follow training materials. Sam Williams  presented a 20 minute excerpt from the latest Lugradio episode which included an interview with Miguel De Icaza on the mono development environment. In the end several of the group adjourned to a local dining establishment for additional discussion.

01/21/2005 Tonight was one of those truly special and enchanted evenings. We had a marvelous prediction of  6 to 10 inches of snow. The Weathermen said that the snow would start falling around 5pm... Weird, but the snow started almost, exactly at 5pm... Well they had to get lucky sooner or later.

We had about 12 people in attendance at the meeting tonight. It was surprising how many Linux enthusiasts were willing to brave the wild weather....  We had two presentations planned. The first featured  Joe Terrell  giving a talk on using the tool webmin with the virtualmin plugin to set up a series of  virtual server. Joe demonstrated several things, including the ability to log the network traffic for his site. It turned into a funny event because there was an anomalous data transfer from 2 hours earlier of 44 Mbytes which greatly exceeded all the other hour totals he had show us.  We then proceeded to perform a forensic analysis on the system to determine if anyone had broken into his system. It was great fun and in the end a suggestion of the anomaly was provided and later proven to be true. For the record Joe was not cracked!

Sam Williams  provided a demonstration of the apt / yum tools for installing new software or software updates on a Fedora Core 3 system. He borrowed a newly installed system from Gary Melvin, and showed how easy it was to install programs like OpenOffice and Gnucash, assuming you had a fast network connection. After all was said and done, the meeting ended at around 11pm. Everyone went home this evening instead of going out, because the unplowed roads were getting pretty bad. Fortunately, we had no accidents and all is well... Until next month!

12/17/2004 Well tonights meeting was just a surprise. Initially it sounded like many of our members were not going to make it. Towards that end we postponed the presentation that was scheduled for a later meeting. In the end we have about 15 people show up. We spent the evening talking about everything under the sun. It was a great, informal meeting. Hopefully everyone in the LUG has a great holiday season!!

11/19/2004  We have about 18 people attend the November meeting. Dean Irvin, of FatWallet continued  his discussion of using PHP and MySQL to help construct a robust and highly effective website.  One day we will be switching the RRLug website to php based on recommendations by Dean. Wes Hegge of Signalblast brought and demonstrated several new designs for WiFi Antennas and gave  a discussion  on their theory of operation. KR Foley will discussed and demonstrated how to use and configure User-Mode Linux. All the presentations were excellent as usual! Thanks Dean, Wes, and KR for the time and effort to prepare and give your presentations.

10/15/2004  The October meeting had about 23 people attending. There were several people that we hadn't seen in a while, but its always good to catch up. Tonight we had a special presenter from Novell. His name was Tin Kresler. It was a very interesting meeting. Tim Spoke for almost 2.5 hours and discussed some of the strategic direction that Novell is taking after its acquisition of SuSe Linux and Ximian. Tim brought a few nice handouts to augment the presentation.  Afterwards, Tim stayed around and  chatted for awhile, but then had to get back home to Chicago. Hopefully, his "Sweetest Day" celebration with his wife went well the next day. Hopefully, we will be able see other people come in from Chicago over time. Thanks Tim.... After the meeting adjourned we had a few people that went to Hooters, some that went to Barnes and Noble, and John, Brad, and Sam that stayed at the college and talked for another hour and a half.... Look forward to seeing you all next month.

09/17/2004 We had about 15 people in attendance tonight. We started the ball rolling with Dean Irvin giving a talk on installing PHP and MySQL. He then proceeded to demonstrate several simple things you can do to help automate and develop web-sites. It was a very timely presentation and definitely one that has gotten  a great deal of member interest.

Sam Williams gave a presentation on using a tool called synergy. Synergy for those that aren't aware is a software KM  (keyboard / mouse) solution. It performs similarly to the hardware KVM switches, but does require multiple monitors. It's simple to set up and very convenient to use.

08/20/2004 We had a nice little meeting tonight. Scott Alcock came and demonstrated a product called "Mamba" that he has developed for configuring SAMBA. The description somewhat trivializes the program. It seems like it can do everything that you would need to do as a Samba Administrator.

Tracy Henness, gave a presentation on transferring your existing operating environment to a larger hard drive. He presented his information in a rather unusual way. He presented it as a stream of thoughts he had while trying to solve the problem personally. The perspective was interesting because it demonstrated many of the pitfalls that he had encountered along the way. It was very useful information..

Sam Williams played most of an audio track from a LinuxShow episode a few months back. The track featured all the LinuxShow regulars and a special guest, by the name of Ken Brown from ADTI. It was very interesting listening to this guy. Joe asked why the material had been presented and it was pointed out that while Mr. Brown seemed to be unaware of what is going on in the Open Source World, he is the technical director for a think tank that supplies information to politicians. The information is used to help simplify the complexities surrounding technical issues. Once you realize this you will suddenly be filled with great fear..... It was interesting because it gave an opportunity to see into the mind of someone that only slightly gets it....

The meeting extended until 11:30pm. There was much discussion and as usual a good time was had by all...

07/16/2004

Congratulations and Good Luck Derald!!

We found out tonight that Derald Wood has left the area to pursue a new job in Tennessee. On behalf of all RRLug we would like to say thanks for all your efforts and good luck in your new venture!!!

Tonight we returned to Rockford College after what seemed like a two month vacation. In some ways it feels so natural to meet there. Anyway, we had 16 people attend. There were many of the regulars that couldn't make it. Instead we have three new people. Welcome one and all. We changed the introduction part a little based on a suggestion from Wes Hegge. He thought it would be cool for people to tell how they have been using Linux during the last month. We tried this and it went pretty well. There is a lot of information to be gained from this approach.

Sam Williams gave a discussion on the SUDO command and how it can help safeguard your system by minimizing the use of the root account. We have posted the slides from the presentation, System Security Using Sudo on the presentation page. All in all it gave several people a new tool for narrowing access to privileged accounts. In fact, during the meeting there was one attendee that had been grappling with providing administrative database access for some of the people using his system, without giving root access. By the end of the presentation he had not only changed how he gave them access, but tested it and decided it was a reasonable way to go.

Bob Wirka demonstrated several hardware devices that he had designed and built for customers that were running small foot-print versions of linux. Bob provided many answers to questions by other embedded developers. It was a very interesting presentation that helped everyone understand the trials of embedded development a little better. Great Job Bob!

06/18/2004 Well the last couple of months have been a little hectic. The meeting in May got in the way of the schedules of many members and their families. We were required to cancel it. However, we picked up the pieces quite nicely in a new venue at the Headquarters of Signalblast.com. I would like to send out a heart felt thanks to Wes Hegge and the crew at Signalblast for this opportunity. Now to make things a little more confusing, we are heading back to our old venue in July. We are on the road again to Rockford College. Towards the end of the spring, we lost our official campus sponsor. During the month of June I was able to establish communication with Dr. Caton @ Rockford College. Dr. Caton has kindly agreed to sponsor us for another year. The meeting days are listed on the main Lug webpage. Hint... There are currently many opportunities for presentations :-) We will plan on being in room #16 although I've been assured that #12 could be used if absolutely necessary and if it were available. Thanks Dr. Caton and Rockford College for the opportunity to continue a tradition that we have maintained for over 5 years!!!

The June meeting went really well. We had approximately 16 people in attendence. It was good to see everyone there. The meeting had two really great presentations. First, Roger Grunkemeyer gave a good introduction to SPF and how it could be used to mediate spam in the future. Thanks Roger it was very informative!! The second presentation came from Joe Terrell on the topic of spam filtering. Very information statistics and information!! I have posted Joe's Practical Methods for Combating Spam on the website. I would like to thank both Roger and Joe for two great presentations!!! Both were very timely and ironically while unplanned, they were both in associated areas. Cool....

04/16/2004 We had about 14 people in attendence. Welcome our high school friends! Scheduling for many of our members was pretty challenging tonight. The certification training was put on hold because of Brad's schedule and Sam decided to forego the normal command discussion. About 4 of our regular members were unable to attend. However, tonight was one those fun nights. Everyone knows how difficult it has been to get people to prepare a presentation, but tonight was a little different. Wes Hegge gave a great presentation on hacking the Linksys WRT54G linux based router. What was unique about this? First of all Wes just got the router on thursday, downloaded the additional patches that needed to be applied and played a little. By meeting time on friday he was ready to go. There were no slides just on screen demonstration. It was fun!!

Sam Williams followed suit by providing a demo of a bootable CD running the new Java Desktop by Sun. We poked around a little bit just to see how much it differred from the normal Gnome 2.6 that is currently the default Gnome release. It was interesting, but definitely appears that Sun is going to make a lot of money based mostly on the work of Open Source developers, with a little work from their own internal staff.

We were looking forward to a presentation on installing Debian from Roger. Unfortunately, Roger was unable to work on this during the last month. Sam picked up the ball and ran with it to demonstrate what will soon be the default installer within the next major debian release. The installation was tremendously labor intensive. It took answering about 10-20 questions and approximately 10 minutes and we had a somewhat spartan, yet full bootable installation of Debian. If we had a wireless card in this machine, we would have been able able to connect to the internet and with about 30 more minutes a fully functional desktop environment. Sorry you missed it Roger.

We closed out the evening viewing three avi episodes from "TheBroken". These were pretty stupid at some level, although at a couple of places there was some interesting informatiom. In the words of TheBroken Staff, "Ramzi rules", some of this you just had to see.....

The meeting tonight may herald a change in direction of RRLug. I will make a couple of calls this week to see if we can continue meeting at the College, but current plans right now have us moving to a new location for the May meeting. I will pass this information along as I get it. If this was the last Rockford College meeting it appropriately turned our really good, and definitely one to remember for a while...

03/19/2004 There were about 25 people in attendance. Welcome younger members from Boylan High School. Brad Coxhead gave his certification training, but with a twist. The new format was praised by many attending. Next Sam Williams gave a presentation on using the unix/linux "Screen command". Finally, the last presentation was given by Derald Woods. Derald presented his last installment in the posix threads series he began last year. It has been a very interesting series of discussion that will help many understand the relevence behind the use of posix threads. Good Job Derald and many thanks..

02/20/2004 Our second yearly meeting got off to a good start. We had five new visitors.... Welcome! Brad Coxhead began the evening with the usual linux certification discussion. It went pretty well. We all realize though that taking the test actually requires a little acceptance of ambigiousness :-) Some of the ideas of the test makers seem a little less then real world. Oh well, it was fun an entertaining to watch everyone world through the question options. Derald Woods was on the go for work this month and had to postpone his presentation until March. Darryl Palmer was missing in action for his presentation and we're not really sure what the future holds there. Sam Williams offerred a lengthly discussion on using the "find" command. Several people have used this before, but he tried to present aspects that would be interesting to all attendees. Brad finished the meeting off with the "tar" command. Tonight was a return to the basics night. Much great discussion and many debates, but fun nevertheless. When the meeting was over we had two groups, one that headed to Hooters and the other that went to Barnes and Noble. Would like to throw out the idea that perhaps for the future meetings we could do both. It might require leaving the meeting a little earlier.... Food for thought.

01/16/2004 Happy New Year !!!! We started our meetings off pretty well. We had roughly 21 people in attendance. This wasn't bad at all for the first meeting of the year. There were some last minute agenda changes to the meeting but I feel it worked out pretty well. Unfortunately the new year's scheduling had not been good to Darryl Palmer and he asked to push his second part of the three part series to February.

Brad got the ball rolling with his Linux Certification overviews. These are moving along at an interesting clip. Unfortunately, Brad does some of his overhead preparation in Powerpoint and as such many linux commands are mangled because MS just doesn't get it.......... Or do them?

The next presentation came from Brad's son Kyle. During the first segment he demonstrated an interesting PlayStation2 game. It features a web-cam. It allows the user to be referenced through the camera and become part of the game. The games were a little bit simplist due to the problems associated with the complexities of interacting with the games, but I think they are designed to get the kids up off the coach and get them moving. Its sorta an extrapolation on the Dance Dance Revolution idea. Kyle then took a few minutes and demomstrated several of the games that accompany the Knoppix distribution. All in all, he did a marvelous job. I'm quite refreshed to see somone of Kyle's age have no fear when presenting something to a group of 21 adults!!! Great Job Kyle, keep up the good work!

Next Sam Williams gave a presentation on several bootable linux distributions. He discussed the history of the bootable distribution and where the idea came from. He then briefly presented the following:
The final presentation of the evening came from Derald Woods. Derald completed the second part of his three part series on using and programming Posix-threads. The presentation is very interesting and answers a lot of questions. Thanks Derald. The weather turned bad while we were in the meeting so no one went out afterwards as far as I'm aware.

12/19/2003 Tonight we had the first annual Rock River Linux Users Group System Cracking contest. The field was a little smaller then we thought it might be initially. The prize was a book/CD based course on Python programming from Prentice Hall Publishing. In the end, it came down to two that tied. The first was Dean Irvin of Fatwallet.com and second, Joe Terrell of American Express. In the end Joe took home the prize. There was a lot of information that was garned from this contest. Next year we should be able to design the contest a little better. Would like to thank everyone for being such good sports, especially Dean who accidentally got the root password changed on his laptop, sorry Dean :-)..... Afterwards we adjourned to Hooters for an Age guessing contest, by one of the younger, yet incredibly insightful waitressess. Needless to say, this authors Christmas began early when he was guessed to one of the younger members of the group.... Can you guess who she thought looked older ?????

11/21/2003 The meeting was a little lighter tonight then usual. Apparently the phase of the moon caused a scheduling problem with almost everyone except for KR Foley who showed up and gave a great presentation on the Jabber instant messaging protocol and environment. KR discussed several of the many projects that are in the works today for using this open protocol to help solve all your instant messaging needs. Thanks KR, very informative.

10/17/2003 We had an interesting program lined up tonight. Brad had some scheduling conflicts and was unable to provide his usual certification training. He will resume this effort for the November meeting.

Wes Hegge started us off with a continuation of his tripwire presentation from three months back. He provided a Quick Installation Cheatsheet for the group. Additionally, he gave some ideas on how one would use tripwire in a multi-server environment. Wes is going to continue his discussion with a third sessions in December.

Darryl Palmer started the evening off with the first of three training sessions on using PHP. He discussed some of the history behind PHP, some of the development tools, and gave several coding examples with great discussion. PHP is of major interest to many, and no one was disappointed.

Derald Woods began an interesting presentation on using "Posix Threads" for the beginner. He presented some excellent references in addition to getting many members thinking about the reasons that posix threads make sense particularly when compared against the more traditional unix fork/exec model. Derald will continue this series next month with part II.

Thanks to all presenters!!! It was a very informative meeting that indicates part of the reason we get together. Afterwards, several members went to Hooters for some grub and additional discussion..... Dean wasn't this your idea :-) Until next month!!!

09/19/2003 Tonight was one of those nights that come along once in a great while. Many of our regular members were either late or unable to attend this meeting. One of our presenters was ill to boot. Brad conducted the certification training, then jumped right into a discussion and demo of Knoppix version 3.2. Thanks Brad for handling the evening. When the rumble had cleared most of those that remained ended up adjourning to Hooters for continued discussion and drinks. Hope to see everyone next month....

08/15/2003 Tonight we had an average of 21 attendees. The program was a little light tonight. Summer is starting to slow down and the number of people that can spend the time to prepare a presentation has diminished a little. Taking all this in stride, we began the evening with Brad's certification training. Up till now the cert-work has been a little dry. Introductory material almost always is if most had learned it several years earlier. Well, Brad, not to be outdone has come up with a way to make the material much more interesting and engaging to everyone. Kudos. I think many people were able to get more out of his presentation then in past meetings and it was a heck of a lot more fun.

WE finished the meeting off with a screening of the always interesting Linux Documentary, RevolutionOS. It is really amazing that as time goes on we encounter more and more people that are unfamiliar with how the Linux movement really began. I think everyone was pleased by the film and the ability to refresh their memories. It was a good time. We hung around, the college after the meeting, and were not able to get to Barnes and Nobles before it closed. Next month we will adjourn to Hooters afterwards..... Have a great month.

07/18/2003 We had approximately 20 people in attendance. Regrettable, Brad was unable to join us tonight and continue his discussion on Linux certification. Hopefully he will be able to resume these activities new month. We had too very excellent presentations this evening by two first time presenters. First of all let me thank you both for volunteering. These presentations are what keeps us coming back month after month.

Our first presenter was Derald Woods. He gave a very good overview of libUSB. He provided information for various Linux usb projects, sources of usb API's, and enough program code to whet the appetite. Derald gave a great presentation with just the right balance of technical material. The programmers were intrigued and those that don't program listened attentively. Thanks again Derald... Great Job..

Our second presenter was KR Foley. KR gave a very important presentation to many LUG members. There have been many members of the LUG that have wanted to give up on windows as their main operating system, but have not been able to because of the need to run one or more windows applications. I'm sure over time this will become less necessary as more ISV's port their product to Linux, but for the time being there are several people that would like to run Linux and their favorite windows application. KR's presentation provided the background for an excellent product that will let a Linux user have his cake and eat it too. CrossOver Office may not allow you to run all the windows software you have ever used, but it could help you get over the hump in the meantime. KR gave several good demonstrations, as well as talked about and demonstrated the crossover plugin for browsers... His was a very good presentation as well. Thanks for the good work guys!!! It was really a great meeting!

06/20/2003 We had approximately 22 people show up at the meeting. The majority of these were there in time for the  first presentation. Brad Coxhead started us off promptly at 6:30pm with  Linux Certification preparation class #2. Dean Irvin  discussed  a series of benchmark scenarios he created for testing performance characteristics of ftp, samba/smb, and nfs. Over the last year we have had several members that felt that samba represetnted the best performance from a linux machine for data transfer. Dean's tests demonstrated very clearly that samba wasn't the best, but certainly wasn't the worst file transfer protocol. Several scenarios were presented with good test results.  Wes Hegge brought a good presentation for the use of tripwire. His presentation highlighted tripwire, as not only the basis for an intrusion detection system, also as the cornerstone of a policy for system integrity management. His presentation discussed ideas for configuring tripwire in a production environment.  I would like to thank Brad, Dean, and Wes for a meeting full of good technical information. Hopefully, I will have Dean's and Wes' presentation online for reference when time permits.  Finally, we attempted to  not heed Jeff's advice and brave the crowd at Barnes and Noble. It seems that Harry Potter #5 was released at midnight and there were a number of rather zealous Harry Potter fans at the store. Brad even had his Harry Potter glasses... It was sick, what can I say. By popular request I think we may depart from our previous norm and seek an after-meeting location where we can get higher octane drinks then the normal coffee.... More to come :-)

05/16/2003 The meeting had a good turn-out. There were about 19 people in attendance. Brad Coxhead Started us off promptly at 6:30pm with the first of many classes covering information that is required to achieve Linux Certification. Everyone seemed very interested in the subject. Sam Williams then proceeded to give the first of several proposed talks on the /proc filesystem and how it can be used to help support and tune a linux system kernel. There were several laughs as always, but good points were brought up on some of the basic ideas that should be considered when working with this very important filesystem. The slides from the presentation have been posted on the website at the following link called the Linux /Proc Filesystem Part 1 . Brad finished the evening with a brief discussion, for those that have never done it, on the creation of a basic web-page using a normal text editor. The discussions went very well and as always we adjourned to Barnes and Noble for some coffee and further discussion. A good time was had by all.

04/25/2003 We had 17 people in attendance tonight. It was a very good crowd. Joe Terrell gave a detailed overview of "adequate" Apache security. There were many questions asked. Thanks for the presentation Joe and congrats on your new job. We unfortunately, had scheduling or logistical issues with the remaining two presentations so they will be postponed for now. We did spend a little time discussing issues and topics that the membership would like to see presented in future upcoming meetings. We also have a major meeting change planned for at least the next six months and possibly longer. Brad Coxhead is going to spend the first 30 minutes of each meeting discussing Linux Certification issues. So that interests you at all please plan on being there promptly at 6:30 for each meeting.... We had a really good time, and then adjourned to Barnes and Noble for the prerequisite designer coffee :-)

03/21/2003 Tonight we had 25 people attend the meeting. Welcome one and all. There were three discussion topics that had been selected for this evenings meeting, but unfortunately only two were give. After a little more trouble then usual with hardware the meeting was able to begin. Tracy Henness led off with a good introduction to Lindows. Given his familiarity with the Lindows project and since he is a "Lindows Insider" he was asked if he could provide a little information for all those curious souls regarding Lindows vs Linux vs Windows. Tracy laid out a good presentation and took is through the pros and cons of Lindows relative to other OS's. The presenation was very eye opening, particularly in light of the new machines that are being sold with Lindows as the primary OS. Good Job Tracy!!! Thanks for presenting on short notice. His presentation may be viewed online . The Apache security discussion will be tabled until next month because of technical difficulties. The final presentation of the evening was given by Sam Williams who gave a broad, yet succint discussion of the many linux documentation sources. Slides from Sam's presentation can be viewed online.

02/21/2003 We had an incredible turn-out tonight, with a total of 24 people showing up!! We would like to offer a special welcome to the many new people that came tonight!!! There were a total of 3 presentations. We first, started with Joe Terrell giving a great presentation on Apache Performance Tuning. The presentation centered around the newest version of Apache (2.0.44). Joe gave some great ideas on enhancing performance. He first, level-set the audience with the idea that his performance recommendations did not actually keep security in mind. In a nutshell he was looking for a no compromise approach to performance tuning. I'm sure Joe would be willing to give a presentation on Apache security in an upcoming meeting!!

Mike Urbanski gave a good overview of using libXml and xml in general. I know many of our members have expressed an interest in this technology, but were really curious how to begin using it. As usual, Mike provided some good recommendations on how a beginning Xml user would begin. Thanks Mike!!!

Sam Williams gave a sometimes comedic view of CVS, the concurrent versioning system. The material covered the basis of how, when, and why one might want to use this version management tool. Examples were given, tried, and in some cases actually worked the way they were intended.

Special Thanks to Andy Marvitz for providing his laptop for use during two of the three presentations!! Sorry Dean I never got around to running ifconfig :-). We went to Barnes and Noble afterwards although there was a request placed on the table for future consideration regarding a location change that served higher octane drinks then coffee.... Updates to follow...

01/17/2003 Tonight we met for the first meeting of the year. There was a healthy turn-out and we had 4 new people show. The presentations started with Bob Wirka showing the ins and outs of reducing the operating footprint of a standard linux distribution for use as an embedded operating system for appliance development. Mike Urbanski gave an impromptu presentation on a new streaming media server he had recently set up, in leiu of the planned presentation on xml which was inadvertently lost prior to meeting time... Nice save Mike!!! Afterwards we adjourned to Barnes and Noble for the prerequisite monthly coffee...

12/20/2002 Welcome All New Comers..... The December meeting was the final meeting of the year. We had a really good year with all the new members and presentations. 2003 seems like it will present an even greater opportunity for growth. News Item:Brad Coxhead, CS Professor at Rockford College gave an update on some potential changes within the college that could alter the use of the Rockford College meeting room. I will try to keep ahead of this problem as I attempt to find an alternative site just in case.

There were several speakers that had been tentatively scheduled, but were unable to attend. Kyle Martin volunteered to give a presentation on programmer development tools under linux and freebsd. Bob Wirka gave a very interesting introduction to the former Cygnus product called Source Navigator. During the meeting we even had several people download it and build it after they had seen it demo'ed. Sam Williams gave a 30 minute presentation on the early history of Linux and Open Source. All in all it was a pretty good meeting with lots of new faces. After the meeting several of us concluded the meeting with our sojourn to Barnes and Noble for a little coffee and a little more conversation... Thanks to everyone for making this a really good year. Next year we will attempt to have more demonstrations and presentations to help teach and enlighten. We at RRLug hope everyone has a safe and happy holiday season... Until next year!!!!

11/15/2002 Welcome to all newcomers in the November meeting. I counted 3 new LUG visitors. Joe Terrell provided the beginnings of a great discussion on the how and whys of converting from a Microsoft based office environment to one that is primary Linux based. Joe touched on the basics. He plans on continuing the discussion in January. We're all looking forward to it. Dean Irvin brought a Gigabite computer that he put together during the meeting. It was attractively styled with a Pentium 4 (1.8 Ghz) with 256 Mbytes of ram. It was a pretty cool computer. Sam Williams gave a brief demonstration of a new bootable "live" linux distribution called Knoppix. After showing some its finer features Sam proceeded to use an installation script that comes on the CD and within about 20 minutes had Knoppix installed on Dean's harddrive and the system was ready to roll. It is a great distribution if you need to recover systems, are on a windows machine that can't be altered, or test driving new computers in the computer store that you might consider buying. Bob Wirka demonstrated a small single board embedded application he has been working on. Bob gave a brief discussion on cutting a "full" distribution down to size for the task. It was very interesting information. After the fun and games we all adjourned to Barnes and Nobles for our usual coffee....

10/19/2002 Welcome to all newcomers in the October meeting. I counted at least 4 new LUG visitors. Darryl Palmer continued his discussion on PHP. It really is a neat language for developing dynamic content for web developments. The really neat thing is its free. Darryl also demonstrated a PHP IDE from Zend. Thanks Darryl, we are looking forward to seeing the next installment in December. Kyle Martin tried to convince us all to switch to FreeBSD. He brought up some interesting points during his comparison of Linux vs FreeBSD. I would like to see a demonstration from him at some future point on using the FreeBSD ports system. It was a good presentation, good material. Unfortunately, our third presenter was unable to attend last, because of an unforseen problem. I would really like to applaud the two presenters we had last night, because of their subjects and also because they are new members of the group. Good Job guys. On a final note, Kyle Martin and Joe Terrell proposed a group programming project. It would be the development of a Soma Cube solver. Don't know if you are interested, but if you are please send either of them email. As always, we adjourned to Barnes and Noble for coffee....

09/20/2002 We had a great meeting tonight. We have a few re-schedules that were necessary because of personnal scheduling committments, but we recovered very nicely. First, we had Alec Garden giving a presentation on Python. This was the first time many members had ever seen the language and Alec did a great job. In a couple of months he plans on adding additional LUG installments on the language. Second, we had Kyle Martin (Freebsd package maintainer) helping us understand a little more about Freebsd by setting up an IRC session with one of the core Freebsd developers, Robert Watson. The evening went by pretty quickly, and we adjourned for more coffee and chatting at Barnes and Noble.


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