Yes, we will be meeting this coming this Thursday, September 2nd, on almost the eve of the Labor day Weekend (Hey, Labor day isn't until September 6th!). We hope you are able to join us. We will be meeting at the Boise Public Library! on Capitol Blvd, in the computer lab at our usual time of 6:30 PM. The first two items on the meeting agenda are by request.

On the meeting agenda:

1) File and Folder Sharing with Linux and Windows - Focus on SMB/CIFS/Samba based sharing. Ubuntu special sharing features as well.
2) CUPS printer setup - GUI and Web based.

Moving forward on our plans for the Idaho Linux/OSS Day on Saturday Nov, 20th, 2010, we met in the Idaho Linux Users IRC Meetup on August 25th. Represented was both Boise and Eastern Idaho. We went over the current plans for three sessions consisting of an opening session on "Why Linux" in educating potential Linux users as to why they would want to use Linux over some other operating system; the session would focus on ease of use, the "free" quality software that is available in Linux, and compatibility with Microsoft applications.

We had a great meeting with 14 members in attendance and one spouse. Our main presenter was Chad Nelson on the subject of playing games on Linux. He started out by showing us World of Goo, from 2dboy, which was part of the Wolfire Humble Indie game suite offering (which is now over). The game is still available from 2dboy. http://2dboy.com/games.php for $20. The Wolfire Humble Indie initiative was an "event" where Wolfire offered up a collection of 7 games for sale in a bundle but you could set your own price. Details of the event can be found at http://www.wolfire.com/humble.

I have been using openSUSE 11.3 for about a week until tonight when I decided to install Fedora 13 on that computer. I had installed the new KDE 4.4 version and I was pleased with the look and feel but too many problems kept getting in the way of my effective use of openSUSE. Examples:

We held our second Idaho Linux Users IRC Meetup on July 21st with 5 in attendance, all from the Boise area. We did have about a 90 minute discussion, primarily centered on the planning the statewide event promoting OSS/Linux on Saturday Nov, 20th, 2010. Plans are to still shoot for four physical locations to have this event simultaneously. Those locations would be North Idaho (Moscow), South East Idaho (IF), Twin Falls and in the Boise Area. We discussed the agenda at some length, proposing three segments.

I had my first opportunity to use the new version 5.0 of PartedMagic and all I can write is that PartedMagic just took a quantum leap as it moved from the 4.x series to 5.0 and the changes include a new opening menu screen with options not seen before including the SuperGrub disks for version 1 and 2 grub. Besides the new menu and run options, PM provides both Clonezilla and Ghost4Linux for all your cloning tasks. I used Clonezilla yesterday to move a physical hard disk to a virtual disk in VirtualBox using the cloning process, very cool.

We had a great meeting with 10 in attendance including 2 who had not previously attended and were not on the mailing list. Awesome for a warm July Evening! Clint opened the meeting with a demonstration Fedora 13 which he had installed on his laptop in a dual boot configuration. His first comment was on how Fedora 13 handled the "dual monitors" of the built in "wide screen" and the overhead projector as it was observed that it left the display settings on the laptop alone but set the proper 4:3 resolution on the projector so that both displays were "normal" in appearance.

The first Idaho Linux Users IRC Meetup was held on June 16th, 2010, at 7 PM in #idaho-linux-users on Freenode.net. With 8 attendees, we had a lively conversation about and we were in agreement of working towards having a statewide event promoting OSS/Linux on Saturday Nov, 20th, 2010. We would shoot for four physical locations to have this event simultaneously. Those locations would be North Idaho (Moscow), South East Idaho (IF), Twin Falls and in the Boise Area.

Prologue: One of our members asked me about getting his computer working with Fedora on the second Hard Drive without disturbing the WindowsXP that occupied the primary drive or boot drive. His request had a part 2 in that he wanted to upgrade his existing Fedora 12 which was un-bootable but still installed on Drive 2. So my part was to do a test installation on one of my computers where I setup the first hard drive with WindowsXP installed, occupying the entire drive and then a second "blank" hard drive on which I would install Fedora 12 to and then do an upgrade.

This blog post is a How-to in using IRC Chat Clients.

You have some choices in how to connect from your computer to our IRC session on Freenode.Net. The easiest is using a browser to connect to http://webchat.freenode.net where you will be prompted for a Nickname (username) and a channel to connect to. I do not recommend putting a channel name at this point but clicking on "Connect" after entering a Nickname. By not entering a channel (group) name, it will take you to a status window where you can see if your Nickname is already in use (does it belong to you?).