Linux Special Interest Group
of the Westchester PC Users Group

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At the April 14th meeting Ed Weinberg tipped a cornucopia of information our way in a 2-hour Q&A session which contained too much for your WebMaster to capture all of it here. However, here are a few items to follow up:

  • Linux Desktop vs Workstation vs Server: Not a lot of detail, but the point was made the major distros offer both server and workstation installations. An appealing suggestion was using one of your old tea-kettles with 64 to 128 MB RAM as a server for your home network.

  • How to view DVD Movies in Linux? Xzine, which comes with many distros, looks promising when installed but when run it announces that for 'legal reasons' the necessary codecs are not provided. They're out there somewhere, but good luck trying to find and install any that work. However a complete player is available for free download at mplayer in Hungary! It is not a piece of cake to install, but with rigorous attention to the installation notes on the web site, the use of SUDO and SUDOERS (to avoid permission problems) your WebMaster got it going. The last key was to kill KDE's artsd utility which was hogging the audio channel.

  • Questions about the above issue led Ed to take advantage of Stepinac's broadband connection and our Wireless Router to pose questions on a user channel on freenode.net, a free volunteer network with over 1,700 channels on various subjects, including one on mplayer, and another on linux. While Ed was discussing other subjects answers to his queries about mplayer came trickling in. Not difficult to use with your IRC program (SuSE's "xchat" works fine).

  • Ed also showed us his own on-line resource, the Association of Computer Support Specialists, of which he is President. Have a look, and some of you may want to join.

  • Brief discussion of the status of RedHat and Fedora led Ed to drop a remark about an open-source package manager called yum, which, with a single command, can download and install the latest version of a program, update all software installed, including third-party software, security updates and operating system! Seems to handle only RedHat and Fedora.

  • Ed spoke at length about the advantages to small business owners of switching to Linux. One client was delighted to discover that OpenOffice is so similar to Microsoft Office that he not only avoided continuous updates and security breaks when he switched, but his staff required virtually no re-training. The suite includes everything: word-processing, spreadsheet, presentations, drawing (altho GIMP is far more sophisticated), and it does business cards and labels. No database.

  • The subject of security vulnerabilities in Windows led Ed to recommend an opensource anti-virus program called clamav, which few if any of us had heard of. They have a free on-line virus scan service. Check it out!

  • No meeting would be complete without news of the SCO fiasco. Ed has found a site managed by a paralegal who has dedicated herself to following every detail of this mess. Check out her site at groklaw.net.

  • Finally, for the radio amateurs among us, Howard Ball showed us a transceiver available on-line, which is totally operated through your PC by software (unfortunately only Windows).