The August 2007 meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group (Sponsored by Red Hat, Inc.) will be held at 7pm, August 9, at Red Hat on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University (directions) . Our speakers will be Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg of the Fedora Project and Red Hat, Inc.

There will be a special announcement for TriLUG members at the beginning of this meeting.

The talk is on Fedora 7 from the perspective of a free software contributor:

1) How packages get into Fedora. Who owns them, how they are built, etc.

2) The compose tools that actually create the distribution. How they work, how to contribute to them, and how to use them in order to spin a custom version of Fedora. A demonstration will be in order!

3) Fedora's community perspective. How we try to build community -- both technical and non-technical -- and how people can become involved in Fedora.

Max Spevack is the current Fedora Project Leader. He has been with Red Hat since 2004, previously as the QA team lead for Red Hat Network. He has a BS in Computer Science.

Greg DeKoenigsberg is the community development manager for Red Hat. He is a former leader and board member emeritus of the Fedora Project. He has been with Red Hat since 2001. Many of the members of TriLUG know him better as "Darlene".

There will also be a key signing arranged by Paul D. Boyle. You can find more information about signing parties here, and Gnu Privacy Guard here. Cristóbal M. Palmer has sent to the list some additional links that are distribution specific to Ubuntu (but may be helpful for others anyhow) for key signing parties and Gnu Privacy Guard here. If you want to get started with email security etc., but these aren't enough then email the list or join #trilug and ask for help.

Just a reminder - the Linux 101 class will be held at Raritan in Raleigh on July 14, 2007 from 9am to 12pm. As of this writing, the class is a little more than half full. This class is free, but space is limited so email Matt Frye mattfrye at gmail dot com to register or for more info.

Raritan is located at 801 Jones Franklin Road Suite 100.

The July 2007 meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group (Sponsored by Hosted Solutions) will be held at 7pm, July 12, at Red Hat on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University (directions) . Our speaker will be Ken Coar, Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation on the topic of "Communication in Distributed Open Source Development".

Dealing with people from afar is not a new issue, but the explosive growth of open software involvement has brought some of its aspects into high, and sometimes critical, relief. People are having to learn to perform common tasks in new ways, and frequently their only teachers are themselves.

Ken Coar is a member and Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, a director and VP of the Open Software Initiative, and a Senior Software Engineer with IBM. He has over two decades of experience with network software and applications, system administration, system programming, process analysis, technical support, and computer security. Ken knows more than a dozen programming languages, but mostly writes in Perl, PHP, and C. He has worked with the World-Wide Web since 1992, been involved with Apache since 1996, has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and is one of the authors of the CGI 1.1 RFC (RFC 3875). He is the author of 'Apache Server for Dummies' and co-author of 'Apache Server Unleashed' and 'Apache Cookbook'. He somewhat spastically maintains a Web log, 'The Rodent's Burrow', at http://Ken.Coar.Org/burrow/ .

Ken currently lives in North Carolina, USA, with a variable number of cats, several computers, many many books and films, strange chemical experiments, and has varieties of furry woodland and feathered creatures frolicking at his (second-story) door. He is deliriously happily married, and his significantly better half, who has blessed his existence for more than two decades, is to blame for it. She is also responsible for most of Ken's successes, and certainly for what remains of his sanity.

Video of the June TriLUG meeting via ibiblio.org is now available. The meeting featured Sapna Kumar speaking about GPLv3.

Thanks to ibiblio.org and COSI for making this video possible.

The June 2007 meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group will be held at 7pm, June 14, at Red Hat on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University (directions) . Our speaker will be Sapna Kumar, Faculty Fellow at Duke University Law School and the topic will be the GNU General Public License version 3. Sapna will discuss changes in GPL v.3 and what they mean for hackers. She'll discuss the infighting that has been going on inside the open source community and how v.3 deals with the growing threat of software patents.

Sapna Kumar is a faculty fellow at Duke University Law School. Her areas of interest include open source software, patent reform in biotechnology, and federal agency law. Prior to coming to Duke, she was in private practice, focusing on patent litigation and software licensing.

This meeting is sponsored by Resolvit Resources: Consulting Services for Information Technology, Business Process Improvement, Data Management, and Staff Augmentation. www.resolvitresources.com

As always, this meeting is free and open to the public. Pizza and beverages are provided free of charge.

On May 6, 2007, /var on talon.trilug.org (web, mail, lists) began exhibiting failure consistent behavior. Kevin Otte presented the following error info to the sysadmin subcommittee:

find: /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/trilug/Week-of-Mon-20030811/019424.html: Input/output error hdc: read_intr: status=0x59 { DriveReady SeekComplete DataRequest Error } hdc: read_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=15750559, sector=15750496 end_request: I/O error, dev 16:01 (hdc), sector 15750496 I/O error in filesystem ("ide1(22,1)") meta-data dev ide1(22,1) block 0xf05560 ("xfs_trans_read_buf") error 5 buf count 8192

With pilot, the new trilug server in place, but only partially configured, we found ourselves in the unique situation of having plenty of resources, but not much personal bandwidth to immediately fix the problem. I asked Kevin to perform a backup of /var pending further action.

Early on the morning of May 7, 2007, Tanner Lovelace presented a report of what was set up on pilot, and we decided to move talon's contents to pilot, rather than putting some "temporary" solution in place to hold talon together.

This work is generally complete, but there are probably a few adjustments to be made, and some DNS info is still propagating. Additionally, it is not yet know whether mail sent to talon between the initial failure and the resolution is available or whether it was lost. If it is lost, please accept my apology in advance.

My thanks to the following people for their technical work and advisory:

Tanner Lovelace Kevin Otte Jeremy Portzer Cristobal Palmer

We encourage everyone to read "How to Report Bugs Effectively" and report any weirdness via the TriLUG Contact Form

Matt Frye TriLUG SysAdmin

The next meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group will be held at 7:00PM at Red Hat HQ (directions) on May 10, 2007.

Our speaker will be Tom Billman of Giant Shoulder, Inc. The talk focuses on some basic video (DV and MPEG-2) processing using open source software on Linux with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn. Simple DV editing will be performed using Kino. Simple MPEG-2 (and maybe some AVI) editing will be performed using avidemux. A couple audio tools will be shown, SoundJuicer, FLAC to ogg transcoding, Rhythmbox. The awkwardtv AppleTV hacking scene will be covered for a couple minutes. VLC and Mplayer will be used to display video and audio. Streaming video will be demonstrated.

This meeting is sponsored by Integrated Technical Services (www.itsco.com).

As always, this meeting is free and open to all interested parties. Beverages and pizza are provided at no cost, but donations are always accepted.

PBS Professional is the core product of the Altair Engineering. Now in version 8, PBS Professional contains several new functional enhancements that differentiate it from other workload management system products especially in support of modern supercomputer systems (BlueGene, Altix and Cray). PBS Professional was recently selected by the DoD HPCMO as the workload management solution for the DOD Modernization Program.

Adam Diaz is the lead PBS GridWorks Application Engineer for the eastern region at Altair Engineering. Adam is an on-site consultant for customers in a variety of industries on the east coast. With a background in computing for the Life Sciences, Adam also works with the Altair business development group to integrate various partner software packages with PBS Professional. Based in Apex, Adam is a NC State Alumni and long time Linux user. He can be contacted at adiaz@altiar.com.