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Welcome to Highland Lakes Linux User Group
Friday, May 09 2008 @ 03:34 PM MDT

What is GNU/Linux?

GNU/Linux as an operating system is very efficient and very powerful. But, GNU/Linux as an idea about how software ought to be developed is even more powerful. GNU/Linux is a free operating system: it is licensed under the GNU Public License. The source code is freely available to anyone who wants it and always will be. The Linux kernel is developed by a unstructured group of programmers from around the world, under the technical direction of Linus Torvalds and other key developers. GNU/Linux is a world-wide movement without any central structure, bureaucracy, or entity to control, coordinate, or otherwise direct its affairs.

GNU/Linux is unique because it does not have, nor is it burdened by, a central structure or bureaucracy to allocate its resources, train its users, or provide support for its products. These jobs get done in a variety of ways: the Internet, consultants, VARs, support companies, colleges and universities. But, increasingly, in many places around the globe, they get done by a local LUG.

Welcome to the Highland Lakes Linux User Group

Thursday, March 23 2006 @ 08:48 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 1,311

Welcome to the Highland Lakes Linux User Group (HLLUG). This website is designed as a member portal and provides a mailing list, information via web links and file downloads, image and video gallery, and community meeting calendar.

Meetings are held at 2:00 PM in the meeting room of the Lakeshore Library on the 1st Saturday and the Marble Falls Library on the 3rd Saturday of the month.

Both meetings are scheduled to last about 2 hours. Everyone is welcome to attend. There is no formal membership or dues required.

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HLLUG Minutes - 2008-01-19 @ Marble Falls

Tuesday, January 22 2008 @ 08:31 PM MST
Contributed by: WB5BKL
Views: 235

Attending were Lee, Cranz and Ben.

Ben solved the first problem by having a key to enter our meeting room on Martin Luther King weekend.

Lee brought a Nokia N800 Tablet to demo. It promptly found several nearby wireless internet access points. Ben tested a USB wireless device that worked nicely with Ubuntu.

Cranz’s efforts at configuring m0n0wall were frustrated by a bad floppy drive. His IBM ThinkPad 380D experiments were blocked by a duff CD drive.

Cranz and Lee quizzed Ben about the PC course he teaches for seniors and how he instructs his students to adapt their PCs for their physical limitations.

Sadly, no cookies.

Respectfully submitted,

cln

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HLLUG Minutes - 2007-12-15 @ Marble Falls

Monday, December 17 2007 @ 03:23 PM MST
Contributed by: WB5BKL
Views: 233

HLLUG Minutes - 2007-12-15 @ Marble Falls

Attending were Lee, Cranz, John and new member/friend Ben.

While an upgrade/update progressed on Cranz' 7.10 Ubuntu machine, the group discussed possible network topologies for his home network. Lee's laptop proved handy for timely research on the internet. Advantages and disadvantages of several arrangements of routers, wireless access points and firewalls were explained.

Cookies were consumed.

It was a very successful meeting - in the opinion of your humble scribe...

cln

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Howto enable Serial Console

Monday, December 03 2007 @ 08:45 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 394

A serial port can be setup for use as a console quiet easily.

For example. for use as COM1 (ttyS0), 38400 baud, 8 bits, 1 stop, no parity:

1. To enable the GRUB menu, add the following to /boot/grub/menu.lst:

serial --unit=0 --speed=38400 --word=8 --parity=no --stop=1
terminal --timeout=10 serial console

2. To redirect the messages during the boot process, append the following kernel parameters:
"console=tty0 console=ttyS0,38400n8". For example:

title CentOS (2.6.18-53.1.4.el5) (hd0)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5 ro root=/dev/md2 rhgb quiet console=tty0 console=ttyS0,38400n8
initrd /initrd-2.6.18-53.1.4.el5.img

Note: enabling the redirection of the kernel messages will disable the usplash screen on the video monitor.

3. To enable serial console login once the system is booted, add "agetty" to "/etc/inittab". For example:

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
co:2345:respawn:/sbin/agetty ttyS0 38400 vt102

Now reboot the computer and connect a laplink style serial cable between this computer and another "client" computer. Start a serial terminal program like "minicom" (set to 38400 baud) on the client and you should see some text asking you to press any key or maybe the GRUB menu once the timeout (10 seconds) has expired. Once the system has full booted, you can login to the machine using your own account or the root account.

Reference:
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Remote-Serial-Console-HOWTO/index.html

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Easy Samba Configuration

Monday, November 26 2007 @ 07:49 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 410

RedHat based distro's (Fedora, Centos, etc) have a very simple menu
application for configuring samba shares. I found a similar gui
application for Debian based distro's called "system-config-samba" that
can be installed via apt.

I have found that setting the Samba Server Authentication Mode to
"Share" is the simplest setup. The owner/group and mode of the share
directory will be enforced. This works great for browsing shares.
However it is not a complete solution for shares that are mounted on
your file system.

If you mount the share(s), then the user accounts become a factor. By
user account it is really the user ID number that is enforced at both
the client and server machines. If you what to minimize the pain here,
create user accounts on the server with the same ID numbers that are
used on the Clients. The user ID numbers of both the client and server
accounts must be identical but also unique. This is true for both SAMBA
and NFS shares!

Now if the Client machines exist before the Server is built and
installed, then most likely all the Client machines, if they have the
same distro installed, will have identical user ID numbers but have
different user names assigned. This will be the case since distros
create users starting at a preset ID offset. For example Debian style
distro's start the user accounts at id=1000 and Red Hat distro's start
at id=500.

In my case, my home file server existed before the client machines and
it was based on RedHat 7.3 the user ID's were originally created as 500,
501, 502 and etc.

500 = lee
501 = barbara
502 = kristeen
,,

As a result, all my Ubuntu desktop and laptop computers have user
accounts with ID's forced to match the file server user account ID
numbers. For example, on my computer(s) I am ID=500, my wife's is
ID=501, and Kristeen is ID=502.

One alternative to maintaining a strict set of unique ID's across the
network might be to install an additional authentication server on the
file server.

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Using cron to schedule events!

Monday, November 26 2007 @ 07:46 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 316

My daughter no longer has a TV in her room and is instead watching cable
TV on her computer which has a nice, new to her, 19" Monitor (thanks to
Don!). Anyway, she likes to watch TV before going to sleep but likes to
set the TV to go off at a preset time. However, The TV application on
Linux, "tvtime", does not have a specific sleep shutoff time setting in
the software.

So, I thought I would try to use cron to turn off "tvtime" for here at a
preset time and maybe find a way for her to change the "quit" time via a
gui application. I found two (2) gui applications for cron; gcontab and
kCron. kCron is the nicer application and easier to use. So I installed
kCron on her Ubuntu 7.10 machine and created a script named "tvstop.sh"
and put it in her home directory (/home/kristeen/bin).

"/home/kristeen/bin/tvstop.sh" contains a single line:
tvtime-command QUIT

Then just make the script executable:
$ chmod +x tvtime.sh

In kCron you just add a "task" and set the time you want it to run.
kCron will install a user crontab file in "/var/spool/cron/crontabs", In
this case it was named "kristeen" and the job is scheduled to run at
11:30 PM every night.

root@kpcomix:/var/spool/cron/crontabs# cat kristeen
# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE - edit the master and reinstall.
# (/tmp/kde-kristeen/kcron5Xxbvc.tmp installed on Thu Nov 15 20:42:38 2007)
# (Cron version -- $Id: crontab.c,v 2.13 1994/01/17 03:20:37 vixie Exp $)
#
30 23 * * * /home/kristeen/bin/tvstop.sh
# This file was written by KCron. Copyright (c) 1999, Gary Meyer
# Although KCron supports most crontab formats, use care when editing.
# Note: Lines beginning with "#" indicates a disabled task.

Cron is very powerful and can be harnessed to do some good things to
make your life a little more enjoyable!

Hey Linux and related friends does amazing things again!

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A Fedora 8 Experience

Monday, November 26 2007 @ 07:41 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 912

My desktop machine in my home office has been running Ubuntu since September of 2004 but after several updates and who remembers what installed and un-installed over the years was very ill. The last update to 7.10 fixed some of the problems but created some new ones; the final straw being complete lock-ups every 36 to 48 hours. By complete I mean that the machine would not respond to a "ping" and the video was frozen.

So, a clean install of Linux was needed. Rather than just install a *buntu or Debian, I decided to revisit my first love, Red Hat now Fedora. The last version of Fedora on my desktop machine was Fedora 2 but I have Fedora 5 (upgraded from 4) on my MythTV frontend in the bedroom and also use CentOS (RHEL clone) on my home & the LUG file server.

So, I downloaded and installed Fedora 8 from the Gnome based Live CD (there is also a KDE version) and then went about installing and fixing a few things. The Live-CD is a reduced set of the basic applications. For example AbiWord is installed instead of OpenOffice.

Since the machine is on a local network and is behind a secure firewall, I disabled "Selinux" and the firewall during installation. Instead of the default firewall support in Fedora I prefer "Firestarter" for firewall support.

Fedora's package manager (Yum) is slow but most of the problem is caused by slow mirrors. However, there is a plugin that can help called "yum-fastestmirror". If you add additional repositories, you will want to install the "yum-priority" plugin to keep other packages from removing and replacing core packages with their own version. To get direct access to multimedia packages, you'll want to install "livna-release".

Fedora has the same "Services" GUI app that RHEL does and it makes it very easy to disable unneeded services. I had to turn off NetworkManager and turn on standard networking to get my static IP and wired Ethernet working properly. Turned off a few other services like "bluetooth".

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Marble Falls Meeting - November 17 - Canceled

Friday, November 16 2007 @ 09:54 PM MST
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 285

The Saturday November 17, 2007 HLLUG meeting at the Marble Falls Library has been canceled this month. Next Meeting is at the Lakeshore Library on Saturday December 5th. See you there!

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How to get mount info from NFS server remotely

Saturday, September 29 2007 @ 12:20 PM MDT
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 474

showmount - show mount information for an NFS server

Option:
-e or --exports <Show the NFS server’s export list.>

Example:
(NFServer=hostname of server @192.168.1.5, 192.168.1.x=wired network, 192.168.2.x=wireless network)

lee@linXos:~$ showmount -e NFServer
Export list for NFServer:
/mnt/MythTV 192.168.1.0/24
/mnt/smb/public 192.168.2.0/28,192.168.1.0/24
/mnt/smb 192.168.1.0/24,192.168.2.6,i1100,i3200,i9300
/mnt/media guest7,i9300,linXos
/mnt/smb/usr/lee i9300,linXos
/mnt/smb/usr/barb i1100,barb
/mnt/smb/usr/kristeen 192.168.2.6,i3200,KPcomix

Now it can be determined remotely that machine "linXos" (192.168.1.2) could locally mount "/mnt/MythTV", "/mnt/smb/public", "/mnt/smb", "/mnt/media", and "/mnt/smb/usr/lee".

Adding the following to "/etc/fstab" on the client machine would automatically mount 3 of the allowed partitions at boot:

NFServer:/mnt/smb /media/smb nfs tcp,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0
NFServer:/mnt/media /media/media nfs tcp,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0
NFServer:/mnt/smb/public /media/public nfs tcp,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=14,intr 0 0

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How to take a snapshot of a terminal or window on your desktop!

Wednesday, August 29 2007 @ 03:59 PM MDT
Contributed by: emperor
Views: 476

The simplest way to achieve this end is typing this:

$ xwd -out /tmp/shot.xwd

And then select the window you want to "photograph" with your mouse pointer.

Once you obtain the dump, convert will help you convert to the format of choice.

$ convert /tmp/shot.xwd ~/shots/xterm.png

or

$ convert /tmp/shot.xwd ~/shots/xterm.jpg

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