[conspire] Upcoming meeting dates

[Rick Moen]

Late every year, the 4th-Saturday meeting date bites us slightly,
because it inevitably falls just after Thanksgiving (4th Thursday in
November) and right near Christmas.  We traditionally cancel those two
dates as "conflicting with the holidays" unless there's serious reason
otherwise, and I've entered those changes on the CABAL and BALE pages.

http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/
http://linuxmafia.com/bale/

The other issue is the other November meeting date, Saturday, November 12 
-- our next meeting.  Problem is that it overlaps Usenix and BayLISA's 
Bay Area Super User Group (BaySUG) confab, 1-5 PM at the Computer
History Museum in Mtn. View.  

http://www.usenix.org/events/baysug05/

If you haven't yet RSVPd for that
(https://db.usenix.org/cgi-bin/Conference/baysug05/reg.cgi), you should:  
There's limited capacity, and you get a free tour of Computer History
Museum, if nothing else.  I expect I'll get tapped to help run the
event, and will definitely be there.  Admission is free of charge, but
you must RSVP in advance.


Last Saturday's meeting, Paul from Novato was back with his very exotic
SAN (Storage Attached Network) SATA-disk array, which he's still trying
to talk to from Fedora Core using some cutting-edge ATA over Ethernet
(AOE) software that he's having to compile and configure from scratch.
This is very intrepid on Paul's part, especially since he's new to
Linux.  He's currently stuck on the step of device discovery and
enumeration, having compiled the driver and control software.


Adrian tried out SUSE Linux 10.0 Eval Edition for i386 (5 CDs), one of
two successors[1] to SUSE Linux 9.3 Professional Edition, but so far has
been very unimpressed by its quality control during installation to his
laptop.  We spent time burning him a set, which I belatedly realised
afterwards was dumb because I turn out to also have a set in my CD
collection.  So, there's now an extra set for anyone who wants it.


Also available for adoption is a CentOS 4.1 set for i386 (4 CDs), which
is precisely Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.0 for i386 Update 1, except
compiled with replacements for Red Hat's trademark-encumbered image
files and themes, so that it's fully open source.  I've replaced my set
with CentOS 4.2 (aka RHEL 4.0 Update 2).  Don't be nervous:  If you for
some reason are considering RHEL, you probably want CentOS instead:
It's all set up for Yum-based maintenance (no more need for an RHN
support contract).  I consider it the best of the RHEL rebuilds for
general usage.  (Scientific Linux is best for computational clusters.)


We do not yet have the recent Mandriva Linux 2006 relese, because ISOs
are being furnished to Mandriva Club members only, for a while[2].  If you
lean that way, consider joining Mandriva Club:  It's worth supporting.

Oddly enough, if you want a _live CD_ variant of Mandriva Linux 2006, 
it's freely available from the Netherlands as MCNLive "Jordaan":
http://distrowatch.com/mcnlive


A couple of distributions are really close to major new releases:  I've
burned a CD of Kanotix 2005-04 RC12 (release candidate 12), because
Kanotix is so useful on new laptops (in particular), and you
often really want the distro's cutting edge, in such cases.  Damned
Small Linux, likewise, is edging towards 2.0 (up from the current 1.5 
release).


I'm upgrading my Knoppix from old-reliable 3.9 to the current 4.02
image, mostly because of a comment in the Changelog that harks back to a
Usenet discussion I had recently:  The Linux-NTFS team recently had a
breaktrough concerning NTFS write support.  The development version in
CVS now does _full, unlimited write mode_ on NTFS, rather than the very 
limited support (basically, only writes that don't change file lengths)
they carefully limited themselves to, until now.  These guys are
super-cautious about partition/file interity:  If they say writes are
now safe, I believe them.  And Knoppix 4.02 has that version of the NTFS
drivers in it.


NetBSD 3.0, OpenBSD 3.8, and FreeBSD 6.0 are soon to be out.  (November
will be BSD month, maybe.)


For Ubuntu junkies who want proprietary multimedia junk with special
ingredient "patent encumbrance", there's a BitTorrent-downloadable DVD:
http://cargol.net/~ramon/ubuntu-dvd-en   (I assume this must be
i386-only.)