Ryedale Linux User Group Meetings
Next Meeting
Yet to be arranged
Last Meeting
Due to the temporary closure of the Spotted Cow due to illness the May meeting was held at Will's Bar. It was a quiet meeting with Martin, Fintan and myself (Paul) attending. Both Martin and Fintan brought laptops along and Will's Bar offers free wifi so this gave us access to the Internet which was good. Both laptops were running Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope).
Main topics discussed included OpenVZ, Puppet, sendmail, gnome-do, get_iplayer and Newsbeuter.
Martin demonstrated the power of OpenVZ and Puppet by ssh-ing into his HP server creating a new virtual machine and setting it up to run various services all within 20 minutes. This was achieved by using puppet which is essentially a script driven server automation tool.
OpenVZ is basically an operating system-level virtualisation technology. It allows you to run numerous virtual operating systems, all independent of each other, on one physical PC. Martin also demonstrated the snapshot feature of OpenVZ which essentially backed up all his virtual machines in the snap of your fingers (appropriate name then really).
Fintan demonstrated Newsbeuter and get_iplayer. Newsbeuter is a command-line RRS reader very similar to mutt in looks. Nice features of Newsbeuter include it's fast, all driven from the keyboard and it can get it load articles in to the browser of your choice should the need arise. Furthermore, because it's terminal based, it cuts out all the advertising dross.
get_iplayer is a command-line tool that allows you to list programs that are available via the BBC iPlayer service. get_iplayer will also download the program of your choice which you can then watch at your own leisure.
Finally gnome-do was discussed. This is a handy intelligent launcher tool that makes performing common tasks on your computer simple and efficient.
Everyone was up for a meeting next month preferably at Will's Bar :)
IRC
You can join us to chat via IRC by pointing your IRC client to irc.lug.org.uk and joining the channel #ryedale. At the moment, with so few of us you'll be best waiting for news of organised meets, but feel free to drop in as you might find a couple of us there. Hopefully these on-line meets will be on a Monday evening starting at roughly 8.00pm. We hope to chat to you soon.
If you don't have an IRC client installed, you can still join us by using the CGI client below.