Another good meeting to report. We had 8 in attendance, about half the previous month.We led off a a short Q&A time after which Clint jumped into his prepared presentation on Grub 2 followed by a demo of JACK using Musix 2.0 and Ubuntu Studio. Clint spent a little time on using LinuxMint 8 which is based on Ubuntu 9.10 which was used for the Grub 2 demo. He had done an in place upgrade on his favorite Linux laptop using the command line menthod as detailed at http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=1144/ Clint is very pleased with LinuxMint 8 "Helena" as not only does it take advantage of the new features in Helena but now he is able to use his built-in wireless adapter. Clint also commented on that "Helena" has benefited from being a releases a month after the release of Ubuntu 9.10 as he has found it very stable.
Moving on the Grub 2 presentation, Clint then went through the new Grub 2 files that are found at '/boot/grub (grub.cfg, do not edit, replaces menu.lst), /etc/default (grub global configuration file) and the file structure found in /etc/grub.d and used during update-grub. Most of what was showed can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2. During the demo, he also showed how to revert to a Grub 2 installed in another partition on the hard drive and also showed how he used Gparted to build the demo system which consisted of 6 different installed operating systems, 5 Linux and 1 Windows install. Also shown was how he had added 3 iso liveCD's to the Grub 2 menu which now supports the direct booting of such liveCD isos, almost like have a virtual machine, no installation needed. Grub 2 Links:
The Grub 2 Guide (formerly Grub 2 Basics)
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1195275
Grub 2 Community Documentation
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2
GNU GRUB 1.97 (GNU GRUB 2) Lots of links.
http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20.html
Manually adding/removing entries to Grub 2 Menu
http://ubuntuguide.net/manually-addingremoving-entries-to-grub-2-menu
Dual/Multibooting incl. iso's.
http://members.iinet.net/~herman546/p20.html
Boot an ISO via Grub2
http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2009/05/25/boot-an-iso-via-grub2/
HOWTO: Booting LiveCD ISOs from USB flash drive with Grub2
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1288604
Grub 2 Title Tweaks
http://ubuntu-install.blogspot.com/2009/11/grub2-title-tweaks.html
Reinstalling Grub 2
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Reinstalling%20GRUB%202
Clint took a number of questions while proceeding through the Grub 2 presentation before launching Musix 2.0 where he demonstrated how the JACK JACK (JACK Audio Connector Kit) sound server worked in "patching" the inputs and outputs of applications as well as the ALSA sound system. He also showed Ubuntu Studio 9.10 which comes with many JACK utilities and compatible applications. His preference for the JACK implementation is the Musix 2.0 as the one that pretty much works out of the box and is well supported on the Musix IRC. JACK reference links::
What is JACK?
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/What%20is%20JACK
UbuntuStudio
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudio
Build your own Ubuntu Studio
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuStudioPreparation
Jack Sync: A Primer for Linux Users
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1004080
Google Search ubuntu +"9.10" +jack
The evening then concluded at 8:30 with a short presentation on installing and using the USB Creator for creating a bootable USB drive. Possible presentation for the January 7th meeting is showing the SLAX (Slackware) installation and use.
