Linux

Helps in installing and maintaining the Linux operating system. May also be of interest to Apple owners using OS X.

Contact: Jim Ritterbusch. Meets 3rd Wednesday, 7:30pm at the DACS Resource Center.

Yahoo! Group: linux_dacs

DACS Community Forum: http://www.dacs.org/forum/

News and Notes

Drew had provided a link for a site that provides instructions on making a bootable USB drive for Linux, Windows or Mac. This was inadvertently omitted from the previous month's meeting, so was mentioned at the start this month. The site is: http://www.webupd8.org/2009/04/4-ways-to-create-bootable-live-usb.html In other old business, Jim mentioned that the Ubuntu launchpad bug site had reported a workaround for the error he experienced on the D600 Dell Laptop using Kubuntu 9.10. The mouse now works exactly as it should.

It's a bird! It's a plane! Yeah, it's really a plane. On a recent Delta flight, Jim observed that the entertainment system on his girlfriends seat had rebooted – into Linux, complete with Tux, the penguin.

Jim polled the group to see what Linux topics were of interest for upcoming meetings. Several good suggestions were made, and will be considered for the future. One in particular, Games for Linux, will be presented at next month's meeting by Joe.

Bill reported a problem that he is experiencing on his Acer laptop that GRUB is loading, but not invoking the Linux boot module. Several suggestions were offered. Rob found an instruction on-line showing how to reinstall GRUB after booting from a live CD. Bill will try that and let us know his progress.

For the primary focus of this first meeting of the new decade, Jim presented “Building Packages from Source”. There are a number of reasons why a Linux user might want to build from source, including that the package might not be available in a specific distro; bells and whistles may be included in the source version that are not yet offered by your package maintainer; participation in a beta release program, etc. Jim showed how to install packages from source by demonstrating 3 installations of increasing complexity.

The Mozilla developers must have heard of our meeting plans, and happened to make a Firefox release candidate available just before the meeting. This represented the simplest installation, only unzipping and untarring the package, then executing it from the directory where it was untarred. Jim showed how to execute the new package without having disturbed the existing package which was still under control of the package manager.

Next up was Midnight Commander, a useful shell and file utility offered as a source package. This required running a configuration script, which identified missing dependencies. Those were installed using the package manager, then the configuration was rerun, the make and make install utilities to compile the source into binary executable files. This also demonstrated using an alternative installation location within the filesystem instead of the default.

The highest complexity item was Xastir, a ham radio mapping and tracking program. This required multiple dependencies be resolved, several of which had sub-dependencies. Once a successful configuration was completed, the make utility was invoked, which then identified a missing run-time dependency. That package was installed, then Xastir was successfully run and a few of its features demonstrated.

Be sure to join us on February 17 for a presentation of Games on Linux by Joe Tobin.