We had a great meeting with 10 in attendance. All the website links from the meeting are included in this report (read more). The meeting opened with Clint showing the FOG (Free Open Ghost) server solution where he had a FOG server running on a tower, a laptop as the "host" computer, and a router/switch to complete the configuration. First stop was FOG web administration tool accessed from the laptop where he showed the different functions including how to configure and image "host" computers as well as defining images. He recommended letting the host computers register (inventory) themselves on first boot using the PXE process but before registering a computer, it was important to define the image on the FOG server so that it can be referenced during the registration process. He concluded the FOG presentation by setting up the "deployment" or downloading of the image back to the Laptop as a full restore and then booted the computer from the restored image. He also demonstrated how the PXE preboot menu worked on the laptop for registration and automatically booting the hard drive. The strengths of the FOG solution include the ability to mananage several Windows based computers, preserving the unique Windows security and name information between each computer as well as Active Directory information in a Domain, even if each used the same image. Clint then demonstrating how to use Clonezilla as he booted up the Clonezilla live CD and restored a hard drive disk image containing Fedora 10 Updated to his laptop and booted up Fedora for the rest of the presentation. Clonezilla strengths were that as a LiveCD, it can clone, backup, and restore disk images or individual partions and store or move those partitions/images to other hard drives, USB drives, and SAMBA\Windows shares. He closed his presentation by commenting on G4L (Ghost 4 Linux) as another Linux aware imaging solution. Here are the links to the various websites for more information and download. FOG Website http://www.fogproject.org/ Installation Video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fvltHkAtW2A&feature=channel Uploading image. http://wwww.youtube.com/watch?v=jPPZr0abVfg&feature=related Sourceforge. http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeghost/ Clonezilla/DBRL http://clonezilla.org/ http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-server-edition/#setup http://drbl.sourceforge.net/ Ghost 4 Linux http://sourceforge.net/projects/g4l GNU Parted http://gnu.huihoo.org/parted-1.6.1/html_mono/parted.html Not covered at the meeting but a installable backup solution that can do a bare metal restore (disaster recovery) is Mondo Rescue, a GPL'd free soluution. It supports Linux (i386, x86_64, ia64) and FreeBSD (i386). It's packaged for multiple distributions (RedHat, RHEL, SuSE, SLES, Mandriva, Debian, Gentoo). Finally, it supports tapes, disks, network and CD/DVD as backup media, multiple filesystems, LVM, software and hardware Raid. Downloads and more information can be found at http://www.mondorescue.org/. Member Gregg Bruch then gave us a 30 minute informative update on his HD Internet streaming exploits and experiences. During the discussion Revision3TV (aka Tech TV) was mentioned a good resource, the impressive "Boxee" Internet TV solution was shown running on one of the member's laptop on Ubuntu 8.10, and K9Copy was suggested for ripping DVD's so you can show them on your linux PC. Revision3TV http://revision3.com/ Boxee http://boxee.tv/ K9Copy http://k9copy.sourceforge.net/ http://linuxappfinder.com/blog/ripping_dvds_to_mpeg4_with_k9copy We also touched on Knoppix's resurggence of late with Klaus Knopper's latest release of Adriane on Knoppix 6.0, a brand new version of the popular Debian-based live CD, now with LXDE as the default desktop and ADRIANE, an audio desktop for the visually impaired. This latest release is a complete rebuild from scratch beta release and as such, is missing things like printing support and the utilities that Knoppix is famous four. Also mentioned was the availability of Knoppix 5.3.1 on DVD but you have to be careful where you download it from as some sites appear to only have a few hundred megs of the DVD which is over 2 GB in size. Download mirrors at http://knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html A new Knoppix website can be found at http://www.knoppix.net/