NILUG

The general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in May. The General Session will be held on 11 May at the usual place and usual time.

If you have questions about file servers or Linux in general, you are welcome to attend the general meeting.

The Technical Session for May will be held on 25 May at the usual place and usual time.

The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

The general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in April. The General Session will be held on 8 April at the usual place and usual time. We don’t have a specific topic to talk about, so we will entertain any questions about Linux and will help people install Linux or fix problems.

If you have questions about Linux, you are welcome to attend the general meeting. Anyone may attend with no strings attached.

The Technical Session for April will be held on 22 April at the usual place and usual time. At the last technical session, we installed Linux Mint on a laptop that was partition-challenged.

The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

The general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in March. The General Session will be held on 9 March at the usual place and usual time. The presentation for that maeeting will be on using Handbrake, a nice little video conversion program.

If you have questions about converting video files or Linux in general, you are welcome to attend the general meeting.

The Technical Session for December will be held on 23 March at the usual place and usual time. In February, attendance was way up for this meeting. We may be outgrowing our meeting venue.

The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

As usual, the general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in February. The General Session will be held on 9 February at the usual place and usual time. The topic for the meeting will once again be the installation of file server software on a Linux box.

Everyone is welcome to attend the general meeting. We are an unfunded group of enthusiasts, so everyone may attend with no strings attached.

The Technical Session for January will be held on 23 February at the usual place and usual time. The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

At the last technical session, we actually attempted to create a dual=boot installation with Linux Mint and Windows 8.

Our NILUG list server is now up and serving messages, so if you are on the mailing list, you can now post to it. If you are not a member, you should email us so we can put you on the list.

The general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in January. The General Session will be held on 12 January at the usual place and usual time. At that meeting, we will present the next installment of our Learning Linux series: More of the Gimp. Since we were unable to install file server software on a computer at our last general session, we will also attempt to do that.

If you have questions about graphic programs, file servers or Linux in general, you are welcome to attend the general meeting. Anyone may attend with no strings attached.

The Technical Session for January will be held on 26 January at the usual place and usual time. At the last technical session, we installed Linux Mint on a laptop that had a very old version of Ubuntu on it. The only hiccup in that process was WiFi, which we got running. We also showed off a Raspberry Pi board running RaspBMC. It’s kind of hard to believe that much capability in a credit card-sized circuit board.

The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

Our NILUG list server is currently down. If you post messages to it, they will go into the fabled bit bucket. So, don’t post until we get it fixed. Thanks.

The general and technical sessions of the North Idaho Linux Users Group will be held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in December. The General Session will be held on 8 December at the usual place and usual time. At that meeting, we will install file server software on a computer that has been prepared for that purpose. Specifically, the computer now has 4 hard drives in it, and we will configure them as a RAID array before installing the file server software.

If you have questions about file servers or Linux in general, you are welcome to attend the general meeting.

The Technical Session for December will be held on 22 December at the usual place and usual time. At the last technical session, we prepared the computer that will be used as our file server. We also re-installed Ubuntu on a machine that was not updated for the last 3 or 4 years.

The Technical Session is used for helping people install and configure Linux, fixing hardware problems and doing any other tasks that need to be done for someone to use Linux on their computer. If you are interested in any of that, feel free to attend the meeting.

We spent much of the last general session coming up with a list of activities and talks we would like to do. They generally break down into two categories: a long term project and talks on various pieces of software. Here is what we came up with:

Long Term Project

The long term project is to build and connect all the pieces, hardware and software, for a small business or home network. We will start from the outside edge and work inward.

• Edge router: This is where the network connects to the outside world, aka the Internet. Software options include: IPCop, Smoothwall, ClearOS, and pfSense. Joe Hume has offered to present on pfSense. If anyone has knowledge on the others please let us know. Update: We will be building this machine at the general session at River of Life Friends Church on November 10th.
• Wireless router: Configured as an access point or a bridge (client).
  We hope to do it as a bridge into the ROF network connecting the equipment in the storage closet and we’ll also do an access point.
• Network: Address schemes, DHCP, and dDNS.
• File server: Partitioning the hard drives, setting up a software RAID, SAMBA, as a Domain controller or using Workgroups, UNIX ids, etc.
• Clients: How to get each to play well in the network. Linux (of
  course), MACs, Windows (XP, Vista, 7, ??). A PVR (Myth*, LinuxMCE) and making sure Virtualbox guests work.
• Misc: RAID (mentioned above), iSCSI (host and client), NAS (as in Network Attached Storage verse a “File Server”), LVM, IPv6, and doing backups.

Software presentations

Software and how to do software stuff: touches a bunch of topics.

• GIMP – Mike B is going to continue with his GIMP classes
• Desktop recording
• LibreOffice (LO) – Pat is interested in using LibreOffice Impress (presentations) and I hope she will take that topic on. There is always interest in using LibreOffice Writer and Calc.
• Virtualbox – Installing and using on 32-bit and 64-bit machines.
• Inkscape
• Making and editing videos – DVDStyler, DeVeDe, etc.
• Image annotation – Shelly is interested in doing image annotations (thanks for being railroaded into researching/presenting on this.)
• ssh
• VPN
• PuTTY

General Session

The NILUG general session will be held on Saturday, October 13, 2012 at the River of Friends Church in Post Falls, ID. The meeting starts at 1pm and runs until about 4pm.

If you are interested in replacing your current operating system with one that has no malware, adware, infections, viruses or trojans, you are invited to attend the meeting and learn about Linux.

If you already use Linux and are interested in learning more about it or having your questions answered, you will also benefit by attending.

This meeting we will have a discussion of what kinds of presentations we should have at the meetings.

Technical Session

The NILUG technical session will be held on Saturday, October 27, 2012 at the F1 For Help Computer Store in Rathdrum, ID. The technical session starts at 1 pm and is devoted to helping users with installations and configuration of Linux on their computers. We will also answer questions about Linux for anyone at this meeting.