Boise Linux User Group

The long anticipated Ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx was released today, April 29th. Excpect delays in downloading depending on your location and luck accessing the download sites. The final Release Candidate was released last Thursday, April 22nd, and seemed to work well plus there was no flurry of problems as were observed when the Beta 2 hit the streets. My DVD download is coming down at a little over 66Kbits and will finish sometime Friday morning before I can test drive it. I did install the 10.04 Release Candidate and found it very stable.

Another good meeting with lots of interest and questions as Clint presented on three subject areas - Lucid Lynx 10.04 Beta1 release, Ubuntu-Idaho, and the Amahi Home Server. Clint demonstrated Lucid Lynx 10.04 Beta1 as he had installed it on his laptop. Clint was very impressed with the stability of 10.04, even in Beta1 release with not so fond memories of the somewhat flawed final release of Ubuntu 9.10 last fall. Long time member Alice even commented on how stable it was as she had installed and been using it on her netbook.

Drupal 6 System Requirements

Drupal requires a web server, PHP 4 (4.3.5 or greater) or PHP 5 (http://www.php.net) and either MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) or PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org). The Apache web server and MySQL database are recommended; other web server and database combinations such as IIS and PostgreSQL have been tested to a lesser extent. When using MySQL, version 4.1.1 or greater is recommended to assure you can safely transfer the database. For more detailed information about Drupal requirements, see (http://drupal.org/requirements).

I heard about these speakers in a promotion from Mandriva as I recall but the offer was only good in Europe. Mandriva was quite estatic about how good these speakers were and sounded and were Linux supported. While I am not curently running Mandriva anywhere, I did test them with both Fedora 12 and LinuxMint 8 (Ubuntu 9.10) and found that they are fully supported as an audio output USB device and sound great. The only issue I had was I couldn't quite get the volume up to Theater levels from DVD's but can't to that either with the internal speakers, always a little wimpy.

Drupal 6 appears to be well supported on Fedora 12. At the last meeting, I had mentioned the project articles in the March 2010 issue of LinuxFormat where installing Drupal 6 was featured as a "10 minute" project. Those instructions had worked well but could use some clarification which I have detailed below in a step-by-step of the process. When I installed Drupal 6 prior to the meeting, the current release was 6.15 but at the meeting 6.16 had been released so Drupal was issuing a security warning that a security update was needed.

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.

We will be having our usual meeting this Thursday, March 4th, at 6:30 PM in the Computer Lab of the Boise Public Library, Capital Blvd, across from Julie Davis Park. While I don't have anything formally planned, I will have a couple of items to show briefly that maybe of interest on both Fedora 12 and Ubuntu (LinuxMint 8). We will take a little time to discuss the results of the survey I sent all. I do appreciate those who took time to respond along and were very supportive, all except one wanting to continue to receive the meeting notes and email notices.

The good news is that the LinuxMint 8, Ubuntu, and Canonical partner repositories are now working! However, you will probably need to modify your sources list. Here is my working sources.list as tested today and I even got the update for Acrobat reader 9.3 from the Partner repository. sources.list contents: (I have also attached my sources.list file but you must be logged in to see it and be sure to do a mv on it to remove the _.txt extension.)

## -----------------------
## LINUX MINT REPOSITORIES
## -----------------------

## +++ Linux Mint 7 helena (stable) +++

At the close of the Boise Linux Group Meeting, one of the members asked for help on creating a LiveUSB bootable device using Ubuntu 9.10. We tried it on both the member's machine and my demo computer, where it would consistently fail and only one time (a glitch) did we get even the opportunity to try to create the LiveUSB drive. We concluded, erroneously, that it was the USB drive that was being used.

We had an attentive 9 members present for Clint's main presentation on Fedora 12 and in addition, Clint also showed a new distribution release called Artistx .08 Live DVD, which was released on February 2nd of this week and is based on Ubuntu 9.04. More on this towards the bottom of the meeting notes.