Boise Linux User Group

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?).

Due to some concerns about a long term relationship with the Ubuntu LoCo Team, and that all Idaho Linux Users don't use Ubuntu, it has been decided to have our own IRC channel space on freenode.net rather than use the Ubuntu channel(s). I have already taken steps to register the idaho-linux-users channel space.

The Idaho Linux Users IRC Group is holding its first monthly IRC Meetup on Freenode.net this coming Wednesday, June 16th, at 7 PM. The channel or chat room is #idaho-linux-users and all are welcome to join in.

Ultimate Edition 2.7 was released this week as a DVD for both 32 bit and 64 bit and was built on Ultimate Edition 2.6 (also Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04) with the major change that it has been fully updated / upgraded and provides the following desktop environments which can be selected at the login: KDE 4.4.2, Gnome, LXDE and Openbox. The developer has included a Conky script that will create a custom conkyrc configuration based on your computer (including any external devices plugged in at the time you run it).

This month's meeting found us back at the Boise Public Library! in the computer lab. We had a great turnout with a total of 15 attendees, almost standing room only and one of the highest attendee count in recent history. Clint Tinsley opened the meeting at 6:35 with a round of introductions given by each of those present.

LinuxMint 9 Isadora was released yesterday and it is 90 MB bigger than the Release Candidate of almost 3 weeks ago, requiring that you burn it to a DVD. I haven't had time to work with it beyond booting it in LiveCD mode, however I have been running the Release Candidate in VirtualBox where it has worked well.

At the May 6th meeting of Boise Linux Group, I demonstrated the LinuxMint 9 and UbuntuStudio 10.04 releases running in VirtualBox OSE running on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. A few questions were asked and this blog post is the result.

Upgraded to 10.04 from 9.10, the update was performed April 29th and was quite the download. most times during the download speeds reached a whopping 89Kbps After the upgrade was complete, and the system was restarted. My Keychain was jacked up, and had to be rebuilt. But other then the small hiccup, everything else was pretty rocking. I did notice that the boot-up time was a little longer then with 9.10 and the startup screen was quite a bit more appealing then previous releases. Im pretty happy over all : ) HP Compaq NC6000C ATI Radion 9600 Intel 1.60Ghz processor 1Gb DDR2 Ram

This month's meeting was hosted by Taos, an IT consulting and managed services company based in San Francisco which has an office in Boise. We met in the Taos office in Boise where we had the opportunity to meeting some of the local Taos staff and we were treated to Pizza, Salad, and soda before the meeting. The meeting started off with a round of introductions and a short presentation by Jayna Weisemann, Taos Relationship Manager, on who Taos is and some of the reasons why they want build a relationship with the members of the Boise Linux Group.