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Please note our meeting location: The IBM offices, at 400 Ellice Ave. (between Edmonton and Kennedy). When you arrive, you will have to sign in at the reception desk, and then wait for someone to take you (in groups) to the meeting room. Please try to arrive by about 7:15pm, so the meeting can start promptly at 7:30pm. Don't be late, or you may not get in. (But don't come too early either, since security may not be there to let you in before 7:15 or so.) Non-members are welcome, but may be required to show photo ID at the security desk.
Limited parking is available for free on the street, either on Ellice Ave. or on some of the intersecting streets. Indoor parking is also available nearby, at Portage Place, for $3.00 for the evening. Bicycle parking is available in a bike rack under video surveillance located behind the building on Webb Place.
Bob Bruce, P.Eng., Geomatics Support Engineer, Lands and Mapping Branch of Manitoba Conservation, was our speaker for this presentation. Bob specializes in software applications for Geomatics, in particular Property Mapping Applications. Bob is a registered Professional Engineer in Manitoba, and a member of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Manitoba (APEGM) Professional Development Committee. Bob also does web-based PHP programming and database design in his spare time. Recently he has developed a mapping interface for the Murals of Winnipeg website, where Winnipeg's murals can be viewed using a map interface.
Bob has made his presentation notes available online.
The presentation covered some of GnuCash's features and also doubled as a fast introduction to bookkeeping. Items covered included account types, double-entry accounting, reports, invoices, bills, employee expenses, scheduled transactions, and demystifying "debit" and "credit."
The presenter, Mark Jenkins, is a recent graduate of the Computer Science Honours program at the University of Manitoba. Mark has contributed a very small bug-fix patch to GnuCash but expects to contribute more in the next year; his employer, ParIT Worker Co-operative, recently received a grant that will fund additional development.
The presenter, Shawn Wallbridge, is a Systems Administrator at Frantic Films. He also runs SynAck Hosting, a small web hosting and server co-location company, in his spare time. Shawn has made his presentation notes available online.
One solution to this problem is to put Linux on a USB flash drive. In this presentation, Michael looked at some of the different approaches for doing this that would allow one to make bootable systems. Michael included a live demo of the construction of a rescue USB stick, starting from a CD-based rescue-disk distribution of Linux, whose uses might include saving a crashed system or repartitioning a hard drive.
Michael has made his presentation notes available online.
Most people dont have satisfactory answers to these questions. MRTG and RRDTool are time-consuming and sometimes difficult to set up, and ongoing configuration is difficult. Getting Nagios going can be an exercise in frustration for the newcomer to network monitoring, and ongoing configuration is a task best left to experts. Monitoring the dozens (or hundreds) of parameters that tell you whether a system is working properly or not is, quite simply, a royal pain.
The developers of Zenoss thought that, too. Rather than building another bolt-on front-end to an aging platform (nagios) or a limited-function tool (mrtg) they just started building a new system that worked the right way. Enter Zenoss.
Zenoss isnt 100% feature-complete vis--vis expertly- installed Nagios and MRTG, but its enough of the way there to make it a lot easier to set up and get going. Zenoss automatically discovers devices on your network, then using SNMP, TCP probes, WMI or telnet discovers what services exist on those devices, and automatically sets up polling of several relevant pieces of information.
Adam Thompson, who's with the Divisional IT Department of the St. James-Assiniboia School Division, was our presenter for this month. Adam covered the fundamentals of how Zenoss works, how to get Zenoss up and running on your network, and demonstrated some of its features on a live network.
Many of the features and capabilities of KDE 4.0 were demonstrated, with special attention being paid to those features which are interesting to those in attendance. KDE's history and community organization were discussed, including information sources for those that are interested in tracking the development of KDE.
Troy Unrau presented on behalf of the KDE project. Troy is a part-time coder and a member of KDE's Marketing Working Group. During the day, he is an undergraduate geophysics student at the University of Manitoba.
Montana and Jeff's presentation included demos of Rockbox running on an emulator, as well as on two media players, an Apple iPod Nano, and a SanDisk Sansa e200. They have made their presentation notes, in both OpenDocument Presentation and PDF format, available online.
Several members of MUUG bought laptops under the G1G1 (Give One, Get One) program, and this allowed us to demonstrate them at the meeting, by setting up a meshnet of four of these units.
Here is a brief description of the laptop: it is really small (25cm by 23cm by 3 cm) with a high-impact plastic case and a membrane-covered keyboard. It looks like it came from Toys-R-Us! The release catches for opening the display are actually two antennae that allow wireless access. The display itself is surrounded by two speakers, two microphones, a camera, as well as power, battery and activity buttons. There is a variety of software that comes with the laptop. It includes a web browser (which also reads PDFs), a python interpreter, and programs for creating audio and video files. It also has journaling software that is user-accessible. This acts like a history that allows the user to jump back to a previous session. There is an installed window manager (called sugar) that is really different from what we are used to on a Linux machine. In addition and not surprisingly, the laptop comes with yum; there is a huge repository of files that may be transferred to this laptop.
Kelly Leveille and Kevin McGregor compared and contrasted FreeNAS and NexentaStor, and showed how to turn an old computer running Windows 2000 into something useful! They have made their presentation notes, in both OpenDocument Presentation and PDF format, available online.
Bill has made his presentation notes available online.
Please note our meeting location: The IBM offices, at 400 Ellice Ave. (between Edmonton and Kennedy). When you arrive, you will have to sign in at the reception desk, and then wait for someone to take you (in groups) to the meeting room. Please try to arrive by about 7:15pm, so the meeting can start promptly at 7:30pm. Don't be late, or you may not get in. (But don't come too early either, since security may not be there to let you in before 7:15 or so.) Non-members are welcome, but may be required to show photo ID at the security desk.
Limited parking is available for free on the street, either on Ellice Ave. or on some of the intersecting streets. Indoor parking is also available nearby, at Portage Place, for $3.00 for the evening. Bicycle parking is available in a bike rack under video surveillance located behind the building on Webb Place.