KLUG Meeting Minutes and Agenda (#45) The 45th meeting of the Kingston Linux User Group was held Tues, July, 9, 2002, 7PM at RMC in room G307. The attendees were: Chretien, Ginger Conrad-Avarmaa, Brigitte Gathercole, Joel Gathercole, Lolen Healy, Art Jezak, Edward Kasiadis, Kali Lott, Rodney Mitton, Doug Morris, Dave Szafranski, Mike Tomlinson, David Wirth, Edwin C. Wright, Michael Meeting Schedule: 46 Tue. Aug 13, 2002 - "Practical Networking" 47 Tue. Sep 10, 2002 - "Network Services 1" 48 Tue. Oct. 8, 2002 - "Network Services 2" 49 Tue. Nov 12, 2002 - "System & Network Security I" 50 Tue. Dec 10, 2002 - "System & Network Security II" Summary Of Activities: - Web page and domain - http://www.klug.on.ca/ - Hosted by Internet Kingston! (Thanks!) - We also have klug.ca registered but it is not yet activated. - Mailing List: Send an email with "subscribe klug-general" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - or "subscribe klug-security" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - Usenet Group - kingston.os.linux (General, not just KLUG) Agenda/Minutes: 1) Roll Call and Introductions (if required) - See attendees above. 2) This Meeting: There were 14 attendees to our 34th presentation "Installation Demo" by Rodney Lott and Doug Mitton (yours truly). Mark was not able to attend so with a lot of help from Rodney we were able to put together a very basic Debian installation demonstration. KLUG has been recommending Mandrake for new users since we started up. Mandrake is always very current with the newest drivers and hardware support and lots of "eye candy". The Mandrake installer hides a lot of the detail from the user and makes some pretty good assumptions and leads to a high success rate for new Linux users. On the down side, Mandrake is a little too leading edge and potentially unstable for "traditional" and enterprise solutions and is not a first choice for that role. One of the oldest and probably the first Linux distributions is Slackware. This has always been a popular choice for experienced users or those who want full control of the installation with no assumptions made for them. The major complaint with Slackware, usually made after having used it for some extended period of time, is its lack of a "powerful" system level package manager. I'm sure Slackware was intended to be this way but system administrators who have to manage large computer installations find it very time consuming to manage them in the traditional manner, a package manager is generally essential. Now along comes Debian! This distribution is very basic, like Slackware, but the package management has been taken to a very high level. Daniel Nagy has given a demonstration of some of this advanced capability in our "Kernel Compile" presentation in May. Debian has all the same new or inexperienced user "problems" as Slackware but the package management utilized in the "dselect" and "apt" utilities are very powerful and being so powerful have a rather steep learning curve. The actual aim of the demonstration was to do a basic Linux install, with basic networking and a GUI available then some post installation package management. We weren't able to actually set up networking but the steps presented would have allowed cable or DSL subscribers to get online. We were not able to demonstrate dialup networking but the configuration options were noted. The actual installation was in 4 steps. The first was booting the Debian Woody 3.0 CD#1 and starting the "Base System Install". This is probably the part that confuses most new Linux users; hard drive partitioning, hardware "kernel module" selection and boot loader installation were completed. This provides a very basic and network aware Linux system ready for the next phase. The second step involved rebooting the system from the hardrive completing the "Post Boot Configuration". Here you make decisions about which packages you want to install such as games, scientific, servers and development languages. Here you also answer questions about your video hardware and XWindows settings. This step ends with a text console login prompt. This portion can be re-run at any time by logging in as root and executing `/usr/sbin/base-config`. The third step is to reboot from the hard drive and see your final configuration. In our case the system booted to a GUI GDM login manager. From here you login as a user to your window manager of choice. At this point the system should be fully functional and, had we been able to complete the networking setup, ready to go for most users without any special requirements. The fourth and final part of the demonstration involved adding and removing packages from the installation with dselect and apt utilities. This wrapped up the evening. I would like to thank Rodney for providing a system and demonstration and to all those who attended and participated. See you next month! 3) Next Meeting: Tue. Aug 13, 2002 - "Practical Networking"