Sean’s Mental Walkabout

June’s LUG meeting last week was on SELinux, presented by Bruce Locke. The subject is amazingly complex, and hence the talk ran the full 2 hours, with lots of great meaty information throughout. The SELinux transition model has always been something that I found interesting, but didn’t fully grok, and this talk helped quite a lot in that regard. Bruce used php in apache as the canonical example of a security issue you need to contain. While my opinion is largely don’t install php on any public facing machine, when you need to support real users, like Bruce does at SUNY New Paltz, that isn’t much of an option. At least with SELinux when, not if, your php app gets hacked, it can be contained pretty well, with a much smaller chance of getting a root shell. The explanation of the targeted policy in Fedora and RHEL was also useful, as it makes SELinux a lot less scary to run. SELinux has a long way to go on usability, but with the Fedora targeted policy, at least it is vaguely usable today.

I’m quite excited for the July meeting coming up, as James Vasille of the Software Freedom Law Center is coming up to talk. A full abstract will be up soon, but for those who have questions around the legal aspects of Open Source, here is one of the experts on the subject. SFLC worked with the Gaim community to get them through their suit with AOL over AIM trademark infringement (god I hate Time Warner). I’ll let James explain a lot more on what they do once he is here. It will be great to have him.

We’ve got September lined up, as Ed previously offered to do a dog and pony show on his Linux CNC machine. Perhaps we’ll add other show and tell Linux devices for that meeting.

August, and months after are still up for grabs, with a few folks giving me some tenative commitments at this point. As always, we are looking for speakers. If you can find someone that is interested in speaking, we’ll appreciate it. Finding and filling the speaker schedule of MHVLUG is always the biggest challenge, and help on that task is welcomed.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Last night was the first MHVLUG meeting of 2007, and marks a return to Wednesday nights (which I think is where we started, though I’ll need to look that up.) The Wednesday night shift appeared to be a good thing, as we had 30 people there, including some new faces. Monday nights were definitely hard, often with the group dropping to 15 or so, so I think Wednesday is probably a good place to keep the meetings for a while.

Mike Kershaw gave an overview of Digital Photography on Linux. After a few slides giving some back ground, Mike started showing demos of applications like gphoto2 (command line tool to get photos off your cammera), ufraw (for manipulation of color and light levels on raw images, if you have a Digital SLR that produces them), and the gimp.

The Gimp demo lasted for quite a long time, and included a lot of tricks including using basic tools such as unsharp mask, and color balance, to touch up any image. The example of using a layer mask to put together 2 images with vastly different light levels was very cool, and explains how the image Mike gave us as a wedding present was created. I personally never knew you could drag around the magic wand to expand the selection, which was a great piece of info that I’m glad to have now.

The demos ended with putting together images using hugin and autopano. I love these tools, and Mike did a live demo of stitching together parts of the room into an image showing that with almost no effort you get quite reasonable results. It was a great meeting, with something for everyone there.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Debugging Hardware/Software on Linux

Joe Appuzo presented the topic. There was an initial discussion about wants vs. needs when it came to a Linux system, followed by a lot of discussion on partitioning a system for success when it comes to system updates and upgrades. One of Joe’s themes when it came to debugging hardware solutions was “value your time”. If a piece of hardware costs $100 to get a Linux friendly version, and you spend weeks trying to get the non Linux friendly version working, you’ve come out behind in your wasted time.

Ed brought up the fact that Turbo Tax is a must have application, which still doesn’t run on Linux. We discussed solutions around that, including using VMWare Server for that class of Windows Apps that you need from time to time. Many people in the room have a single machine on their home network whose job is to run windows, often headless with VNC. The benefits of virtualization here is power savings.

On the hardware point, there was much discussion on old hardware, and about when it’s power costs exceed it’s usefulness. Many folks in the room end up in that “collector camp” and do still have 486s running at home (as a router or such).

On the software debugging front, Joe didn’t get quite as deep in that as I was hoping. Some very basic tips were provided including where to start looking by looking in /var/log, and dmesg output, as well as thinking logically about isolation. “Did this ever work?” “What changed?”

All in all people had a pretty good time, the crowd was chuckling quite often.

At the end of the meeting I gave away 4 books for review, and announced the fact that meetings are moving to first Wednesdays starting in January.

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Vital Stats
Attendees: 29
Start Time: 6:10
End Time: 7:55
Dinner Crew: 14

Popularity: 6% [?]

I’ve decided that I’m going to start giving a synopsis of the MHVLUG meeting just happened, so people that don’t make it, may get an idea of what they missed, and hopefully start coming around.

Main Talk - Build Your Own Digital Picture Frame
Chris gave a pretty cool talk on the process of turning a thinkpad 560 to a digital picture frame that does a rotating slide show on your wall. He prepared a slide show about the process, and things to consider, which will end up on the website soon. The talk also had a lot of show and tell. Chris both disassembled a 560 to show what you needed to be careful about (i.e. what you can break, and what you can’t), and had another 560 running with the slide show software on Linux.

At least 2 people in the audience said they were going to follow this guide to build one of their own.

Other Business

• December Meeting is on the 2nd Monday due to library scheduling. It will be on how to get hardware to work on Linux, and where to start debugging an issue.
• Linux Help Day this Saturday at SUNY New Paltz
• In 2007 MHVLUG meetings are moving to Wed Nights

Vital Stats
Meeting Kickoff: 6:10
Main Lecture Done: 7:00
Headed to Palace: 7:50

Talk Attendance: 25
Dinner Attendance: 7 (pretty low for us)

Popularity: 7% [?]

Last night when my fiance came home, I was quite surprised when she handed me a rather large envelope with the question “Who would have sent you something from Switzerland?”. I was equally confused, until I opened it to reveil the latest issue of Linux Format.

The Linux Format folks contacted me and porkchop in November, to get a write up for MHVLUG as their overseas LUG of the month. Originally we thought it was going to be in the December edition, but I’m more than happy with it in the Jan 2006 issue. So, go check out your local book store, and pick up MHVLUG in Linux Format.

Popularity: 6% [?]

We know you want them…. or at least Joe wants them.
So here it is, ready for your shopping glory. I haven’t yet ordered one myself (need to get around to that), so if you do, tell me how they came out. Also let me know if there are any other Cafe Press swag you would like put up for MHVLUG.

Popularity: 7% [?]