Meeting turnout was great with about 4 "new" faces in the room and we did fill the room. Clint brought two machines for the demo this night and a router that created the "demonstration" environment for the evening. Clint had decided to demonstrate file and folder sharing using Samba which provides a Windows desktop compatible sharing protocol using SMB, which is also known as CIFS in much of the documentation. He had a small laptop with LinuxMint 8 (Helena) installed which he accessed using remote desktop from the demo laptop, which was running Fedora 12 and also had Windows XP on it (dualboot) so he could also show accssing the folder on LinuxMint 8 from Windows XP.

He started off by showing the folder "ease of setup" on LinuxMint 8 (Ubuntu 9.10) as folder sharing is "built-in" requiring only a couple click on a folder's sharing properties to enable sharing. One nice-ity of LinuxMint/Ubuntu is that if the necessary Samba components are not installed, it will automatically install the necessary components provided an internet connection is available. There are two levels of security that you can select when sharing. The first is Guest or "share" mode where guests don't need a login to access the folder but access is read only. The second level which is much more secure is "user" mode where a user has full access (read,write,modify,create) rights but does require a valid login user account on the machine where the folder is being shared from. There is a long standing gotcha with Linux and Samba, which can be a major stumbling block resulting in many giving up on Samba because they can't connect to the share as user. That gotcha is that the userID requires a password be created in Samba as follows which can be the same as the users normal login password or different (recommended if you are going to give the password out). The process to do this is as follows: (Works with Windows 7, Vista, XP and most Linux systems.)

1. Enter root shell using sudo su -

tinslecl@tinslecl-gloria:~$ sudo su -
[sudo] password for tinslecl:

2. Set samba password for access

smbpasswd -a tinslecl
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user tinslecl.

3. exit root shell.

Verify or browse the share. Can be done from either the sharing computer or the Linux computer that needs to access the share:

smbclient -L 172.30.0.77
Enter root's password:
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.4.0]

Sharename Type Comment
--------- ---- -------
print$ Disk Printer Drivers
IPC$ IPC IPC Service (tinslecl-gloria server (Samba, LinuxMint))
documents Disk
pictures Disk
tinslhome Disk
Domain=[WORKGROUP] OS=[Unix] Server=[Samba 3.4.0]

Server Comment
--------- -------
BRN001BA935051F
CLINTIDAHO
TINSLECL-GLORIA tinslecl-gloria server (Samba, LinuxMint)

Workgroup Master
--------- -------
WORKGROUP CLINTIDAHO
root@tinslecl-gloria:~#

While on the LinuxMint 8 desktop, Clint also demonstrated Giver easy file sharing, which provides drag n drop file sharing to any workstation desktops on the local network. Clint had captured a screen shot of the process on a standard Ubuntu 9.10 desktop running Giver. You can find a video demo of Giver at http://code.google.com/p/giver/ and download the source code for it, if it is not available from your distribution's repositories. Clint had built Giver on Fedora 12 using the source code but found that he had to load a number of packages on Fedora before he succesfully complete the build with make install. Those packages were:

gtk-sharp (glib-sharp 2.0 or greater)
gnome-sharp
notify-sharp
avanti-sharp

The build was succesful and it seems to work as the Fedora 12 computer will announce itself in the Giver receipient list on the LinuxMint 8 machine but it seems to die and he was not able to get it to work on Fedora 12 long enough to recieve a file.

Fedora 12 is a little more complicated in that you have to manual install and configure Samba on the computer. Clint noted that one of the first tasks you should peform on a Fedora 12 machine is configure the firewall on Fedora 12 that pretty much blocks everything including Samba by default. He commented that you should enable everthing through the firewall that you think you are going to use! Otherwise, things may not work the way you think they should. You can access the configuration from the desktop file menu at System > Administration > Firewall

Instructions for installing Sambe can be found at http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-fedora-f12.html:

Click on Setup Samba

Clint's notes on using the procedure at mjmwired.net:

Don't worry about SELinux settings. There is no system-config-selinux (assume deprecated).

You must create the password for your samba users as on Ubuntu.
smbpasswd -a username
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
account_policy_get: (warnings ignored)
Added user username.

smb.conf configuration notes:

Set your workgroup name!
Most default entries can be used but you must edit the Share Definition as shown below (not in the procedure at mjmwired.net).

#============================ Share Definitions ==============================

[homes]
comment = Home Directories
path = /home
browseable = yes
writable = yes
; valid users = %S
; valid users = MYDOMAIN\%S

The instructions don't mention adding the path = /home!

Clint's final thoughts for the evening were on the lastest March 2010 issue of LinuxFormat which promotes Fedora 12 as a "newbie" level distribution and includes instructions on installing Fedora 12. In the same issue are 9 quick "projects" including one for installing Drupal 6 on your destop system. Clint's showed Drupal 6 running on Fedora 12. Clint's installation notes as he followed the instructions:

yum install drupal
ln -s /usr/share/drupal /var/www/html/drupal
[root@Fedora12 /]# ln -s /usr/share/drupal /var/www/html/drupal
[root@Fedora12 /]# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/drupal.conf
[root@Fedora12 /]# cd /etc/drupal
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# chmod 777 default
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# cp default/default.settings.php default/settings.php
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# chmod 666 default/settings.php default/default.settings.php
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# chmod -R 777 /var/www/html/drupal

==================================================================================

Directory Contents of /etc/drupal:
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# ls
all default
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# ls -al
total 24
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2010-03-04 16:28 .
drwxr-xr-x 131 root root 12288 2010-03-04 16:28 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-12-17 07:15 all
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2010-03-04 16:28 default

==================================================================================

Finish work
[root@Fedora12 /]# cd /etc/drupal
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# chmod 755 default
[root@Fedora12 drupal]# cd default
[root@Fedora12 default]# ls
default.settings.php files settings.php
[root@Fedora12 default]# chmod 644 settings.php
[root@Fedora12 default]# chmod 644 default.settings.php
[root@Fedora12 default]# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/drupal.conf
[root@Fedora12 default]# /etc/init.d/httpd restart
Stopping httpd: [ OK ]
Starting httpd: [ OK ]

Note, to install Drupal on your computer, you must have already installed a LAMP (Linux Apache MySql PHP) style webserver. Installation instructions can be found at http://www.howtoforge.com/installing-apache2-with-php5-and-mysql-support....

Clint's notes in peforming the LAMP install:

Initial mysqld startup
==================================================================================
[root@Fedora12 /]# /etc/init.d/mysqld start
Initializing MySQL database: Installing MySQL system tables...
OK
Filling help tables...
OK

To start mysqld at boot time you have to copy
support-files/mysql.server to the right place for your system

PLEASE REMEMBER TO SET A PASSWORD FOR THE MySQL root USER !
To do so, start the server, then issue the following commands:

/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'new-password'
/usr/bin/mysqladmin -u root -h Fedora12.BoiseLug password 'new-password'

Alternatively you can run:
/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation

which will also give you the option of removing the test
databases and anonymous user created by default. This is
strongly recommended for production servers.

See the manual for more instructions.

You can start the MySQL daemon with:
cd /usr ; /usr/bin/mysqld_safe &

You can test the MySQL daemon with mysql-test-run.pl
cd /usr/mysql-test ; perl mysql-test-run.pl

Please report any problems with the /usr/bin/mysqlbug script!

The latest information about MySQL is available at http://www.mysql.com/
Support MySQL by buying support/licenses from http://shop.mysql.com/

[ OK ]
Starting MySQL: [ OK ]
==================================================================================

At the close of the meeting, we discussed a possible road outing to LinuxFest Northwest and future meetings.