Lab Notes, Sept. 4, 2003
Present: Mike Cook, Goose Zimmerman, Tom Brown
:: Warren Wong visits
Warren is a board member from the United Religious Community. He dropped
off a cute little Mac (get your fishbowl ready) and a PowerPC. Mike and I
gave him the tour, demonstrated the lab and Vector Linux on a FreeBox and
answered his questions.
http://www.urcsjc.org/index.mv
:: Progress on volunteer web app
Mike and Tom brought Goose up to date on the web app. We briefly discussed
how to handle the middleware for the project. Goose suggested using PL/TCL
to embed logic on the Postgresql server.
:: Backspace key problem
Tom demonstrated how he and Jay solved the LTSP BS key problem.
:: VL4 demo
Mike gave a brief demo of the VL4 beta desktops and utilities. The base
install is slightly larger but still within our specs. VASM now has a gui.
The maintainers added FluxBox (or BlackBox?) to the desktop lineup. Mike
was able to add desktop icons to BlackBox/FluxBox using DFM.
:: New lab night
Tom consulted with Jodi Montgomery, and the church basement is free on
Tuesday nights. Goose will be late to labs on Tuesdays due to a standing
appointment in Elkhart. Jay, Mike, Olin and Tom are free to make the switch
any time. Tom will pick a change-over date and announce the switch.
:: Build FreeBoxes
We spent most of our time building FreeBoxes for the Sept. classes. Mike
got his box up in normal time. Goose and Tom had difficulties with their
boxes. Tom's box had terrific problems with the video card (ATI Rage), and
he couldn't get X to run. Goose couldn't get the mouse running under X. If
we get these boxes up and running at the next lab, Tom will have enough for
the Sept. 13 class.
Tom needs to swap the video card for a more Linux-friendly card. And Goose
probably needs to use a serial mouse. But both of us were too fried by the
end of the evening to attempt the fixes. If it's not hardware, it's
software. If it's not software, it's users. If it's not users, it's us. A
geek's job is never done.
:: News from MLUG, Sat., Sep. 6
. Dan Sikorski donates computers
Dan Sikorski, MLUG member, works for the Pinnacle Group, a
consulting/VAR/IT outsourcing business. Pinnacle handles IT and computer
assets for a large trailer manufacturer in Elkhart County. Dan intervened
as five computers from the trailor plants were headed for the dumpster. All
have nics, cdroms, Pentium cpus. afaik, there is nothing wrong with the
boxes except they are too slow and too old for the client.
Dan also suggested that FGM look to Purdue for mice, keyboards and other
components. Dan's friend, Josh (former MLUGger), is studying at PU. Dan
will contact Josh re the availability of stuff we need. PU has a warehouse
of new and used parts.
Dan is also interested in our Vax workstation and the two DEC terminals.
Dan collects old computers and has a Vax server but no workstations.
. MLUG meeting
Goose, Olin and Tom were at the MLUG meeting. Goose brought his daughter
Mikela, who was cute as a button sitting on Goose's knee. Olin and Goose
left early due to obligations. Tom stayed to the end.
Tom led an impromptu discussion of remote access to LANs at the request of
Doug Germann who is planning to support telecommuting in his business. The
discussion was lively and helped Doug.
Jon Madison gave a demo of Drupal, the open source content management
system. Everyone liked it, and MLUG members want to use the system to
publish the group web site. Dan Sikorski offered to host the site on his
server which is sitting on a T1. The group authorized Jon and Dan to
publish the site and Rick Hughes to change the domain registration dns ip
addresses.
http://www.drupal.org/
http://deanspace.org/
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