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.

The April 2007 meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group will be April 12, 2007 at Red Hat HQ (directions link). Our sponsor for the April meeting is Altair Engineering (More info).

The speaker will be Andrew C. Oliver, CTO of BuniSoft. Andrew will introduce Meldware Communication Suite, an open source, multi-platform groupware package for Linux. The presentation will give an overview of Meldware, its Mail Server, Calendar Server, Webmail and Webcalendar as well as its Administration GUI. The talk will cover some of the technical details including Meldware's flexible email storage using any RDBMS or file system and the integration between the Calendar server and popular clients such as Mozilla Thunderbird, Novell Evolution and even Microsoft Outlook. The talk will wrap up with a demo, a brief description of the Buni.org communication software development community and a call to action for BETTER protocol standards in Email and Scheduling.

We will also be accepting nominations for election to the Steering Committee at this meeting. Nominations are open for all five steering committee positions and should be sent to the TriLUG discussion list or to nominate privately, via the Contact TriLUG page. Nominations must be received by May 4, 2007 at 23:59:59. Please note that SC members are elected "at large" and then decide amongst themselves which position they will occupy. Nominations need not be seconded. You can nominate anyone, but they must accept your nomination to be eligible for election. You can nominate yourself.

Stay tuned for more info.