View this page "ALUG Home"

[Rick Nemer]

Akron Linux Group Formal meeting this Thursday March 6th at 6:30
Check out the web site for more info.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alug-home-page -
or copy & paste it into your browser's address bar if that doesn't
work.

[Bill Mayhew]

Hi,

Those of us from Windows shops doing RAS over PPTP might be interested
in getting PPTP though a NAT/PAT router. PPTP (point-to-point
tunneling protocol) is materially similar to PPP that's used to
connect dial-up links. PPTP supports MS-CHAP (among others)
authentication and encryption of dubious strength. PPTP encapuslates
and encrypts the TCP/IP packet and sends it over the wire using IP
protocol 17.

The interesting issue is that there isn't a port number per se for a
NAT/PAT router to look at for forwarding to on the LAN on the private
side of the router. What the router gets is a frame with protocol
type set to 17 with the IP address of the outside interface of the
router. What to do? There's no port number; the port number is in
the header of the encrypted payload.

There are some interesting tricks routers can do. The router can
watch the handshake phase of the PPTP set-up and note which host on
the private side is initializing with what host X out on the
Internet. The presumption can be drawn that any PPTP traffic from
host X on the Internet must be going to the initiating host on the
router's protected LAN. The obvious ambiguity problem would be when
two hosts on the protected LAN are trying to talk to host X on the
Internet. Without doing some pretty heady tricks, it isn't obvious
which host on the protected LAN should get incoming PPTP from host X.
One inefficient approach might be to broadcast all incoming PPTP from
host X to any hosts on the protected LAN that have recently been
talking to host X. Any of the incorrect hosts on the protected LAN
won't be able to decrypt the irrelevant PPTP packets and discard them.

I'm not sure exactly what the default firmware in the Linksys WRTs is
doing, but seems to be able to pass PPTP though without problems.
This is *not* the case with Apple Extreme Base Station. The Apple
router can't do PPTP pass though unless it is set up with a static
address mapping and the hosts on what would have been the protected
LAN using globally recognizable (non RFC 1918) IP addresses.

I'm wondering how well the various replacement firmwares for the WRT-
like routers do PPTP pass through and if they can handle multiple
hosts on the protected LAN talking to endpoint devices out on the
Internet.

Perhaps I'm way off base in my understanding; it wouldn't be the first
time - but dealing correctly with PPTP VPN pass through would seem to
be an interesting case study.

Bill

[Rick Nemer]

Meeting Topic set for this Thursday's Formal ALUG meeting at the New
Era Cafe.
Check out the updates on our web page.

Click on http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alug-home-page -

[flyingtiger]

Nice meeting tonight. Many topics were discussed for future meetings,
including Basic Linux 101 and bring your machine for troubleshooting.
Hope we don't have too many machines when the bring your machine for
troubleshooting topic occurs. Steve Alexander has taken the reins for
scheduling future topics. Rick has been given a much needed hiatus
from that task. See you June 5th when I give an Introduction to
Colinux, a distro in experimental but workable stage to work side by
side with Bill G's kernel.

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Announcements for the July and August formal meetings are posted !

I am looking for talks for the September and October meetings. If
you wish to present or if you know of an interesting speaker from
outside of ALUG who might be willing to present please contact me
(steve-a...@adelphia.net).

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Ed Ash will discuss storage technologies at our August 7th meeting !
See website for details.

We have a presentation lined up for September, but we need a speakers
for the October and November meetings. Please - if you haven't
presented in the past 12 months - you are due ! A basic "show and
tell" of some package or some distro you are using would make a fine
topic. Would one of our BSD users care to give a presentation on
what drew them to the dark side ? What are the differences between
BSD and Linux ?

-Steve Alexander

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Thursday (today) , Ed Ash of EMC2 will speak on the topic of data
storage technology. SAN, NAS, CAS, iSCSI and flash storage
technologies. This should be a great talk ! Be there or ....

Apologies if this is a duplicate (my TWC account is has problems)

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

I just updated the website for the September meeting.
Paul Ferris will speak on "Managing your Free Software career".

I also created a pdf "flyer" suitable for bulletin board posting.
Please get out the word on the Sept 4th meeting !

http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alugFerris.pdf

-SteveA

[Fred Merchant]

Hi guys,

 

I'm planning on buying a lap top real soon from Emperor Linux www.EmperorLinux.com.

 

The Web site will install any distro of Linux I want (I'm going to go with Ubuntu) but the literature says,

"All EmperorLinux systems come with a custom kernel specially tailored to support the hardware on your system."

 

Clicking the "kernel" link brings up a lot of positive-sounding stuff.  I'm an easy mark.  Is this OK to have a custom kernel?

I guess I'm worried that if I update a Linux distro I might wipe out all that Emperor had in the kernel to support its own hardware.

 

I plan on going dual-boot with WinXP Home, because the Rino D830 comes from Dell, which ships with WXPH.  Will Grub rule over Vista if I decide to dual-boot with Vista rather than XP?  I have understood the Vista Dual-boot has to rule over all other boot loaders.  Am I wrong in this?

 

Thanks

 

Fred Merchant

[Jim Ramsey]

Do they have a procedure for dealing with the next kernel
release - e.g. their own repository?

I've always found tuxmobil.org to be a good source.

Look at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LaptopTestingTeam/DellLatitudeD830

Regards,

Jim Ramsey

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[rubbsdecvik]

I haven't had any experience with Vista on a dual boot system, but I
think it's possible to use grub with Vista. A quick Google search
turned up this: http://apcmag.com/how_to_dualboot_vista_with_linux_vista_installed_first.htm

It even tells you how to get Vista's boot loader to work. If you're
going with Ubuntu, <a href="http://www.ubuntuforums.org">Ubuntu
Forums</a> has a lot of good info. A search on "Emperor Linux" will
turn up some results.

According to <a href="http://www.emperorlinux.com/quality/value/
kernel/">Emperor's Kernel Page</a>, they have their own repository, or
at least download section for each kernel update that they do. I
don't know if you have done a lot of shopping around, but there are
also other places that sell Ubuntu Linux too. I haven't checked out
prices, but you might want to check out <a href="http://www.dell.com/
content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs">Dell
Ubuntu PC's</a> or <a href="http://system76.com/>System76</a>. They
also sell with Ubuntu and make sure their hardware is supported. I
have been looking at System76 for a while, but just don't have the
money for another computer (it sucks being a student sometimes).

Hope that helps a little.

Pat

[ziggy]

A friend of mine had some "issues" with Vista regarding the driver for
the cdrom. I talked him into installing Ubuntu on it. We used the
inherent Vista partition resizing utility to get some space then
installed Ubuntu with the Grub bootloader. It worked just fine. In the
process we found a fix for his cdrom so he became happier with Vista and
doesn't use linux as much since he is more familiar with the winstuff.
He is restricted to dialup which makes getting updates a problem but it
all works. Jimz

[Fred Merchant]

Thanks for the leads. More to read, I guess. I've printed out the material in the links and will read.

The Emperor has it's own kernel and yes it can be downloaded for future udgrades, but I'm worried that when Ubuntu: the Herron's Hardon goes down Emperor may not be supporting either Ubuntu 9 or the Dell D830. I have a weak sales resistance, thus I don't want to call them and ask for answers. I've read all the Emperor pages, but am still left with an uneasy emptiness in my gut.

I'm too old to be a tinkerer anymore, and if I'm involved with tinkering too much when a new version of Ubuntu comes out, I'll put the laptop in the closet and go back to Windows.

Fred

[Fred Merchant]

I looked at the web site for System76. Their support seems to be the Ubuntu manual.  the prices sure look good, though.

Help is in UbuntuForums, in a thread "System 76" which seems chance-y -- you might get answers, you might not get answers.

 

Emperor's Manual has detaqiled instructions on how to do things.  System 76 doesn't talk about the manual, although one user in the forum said their manual is on the comnputer.

Fred

 

The above text is in answer to your message dated 8/19/2008, which appears below:


>but you might want to check out Dell
>Ubuntu PC's or <a href="http://system76.com/>System76. They

[Fred Merchant]

That helps. Thank you.

Fred

The above text is in answer to your message dated 8/19/2008, which appears below:

[Alan Phillips]

Fred --

Another vendor to consider is Los Alamos Computers
(http://laclinux.com/). I bought a desktop system from them last year
and have been very happy. They feature Lenovo ThinkPads, with a large
selection of linux distros available as pre-installs.

I'm running on older Thinkpad (x30), and have really been happy with
distro support for the hardware. I would recommend investigating the
Thinkpad line, if you are concerned about moving to new releases of
Ubuntu, etc.

Alan

[steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Fred Merchant wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm planning on buying a lap top real soon from Emperor Linux

> www.EmperorLinux.com <http://www.EmperorLinux.com>.
>
No experience, but these guys got positive reviews in a fairly recent
Linux Journal comparing various laptop/tablet vendors. They seemed to
have done a very good integration job - drivers for fingerprint scanners
and apps for tablet writing recognition, wifi, built-in camera interface
support, power management (hibernate/sleep). I imagine this sort of
thing explains the custom kernel.

The .config file from their kernel builds (often in /boot/config*)
should describe all the "vanilla" kernel drivers included but they may
have created separate drivers as kernel modules "*.ko modules. These
should be obvious with an "lsmod" or reviewing the modules directory.
So you certainly should be able to upgrade kernels via the Ubuntu
mechanism, but you may have to re-build the non-vanilla drivers from
source to get the added features.

They almost certainly have user space tweaks + added apps too in user
space (outside the kernel).

They are required to make the source available for all the GPL'ed
binaries they sell you. Perhaps as a DVD or perhaps as a download. So
you will have access to everything custom they did to the kernel;
probably everything.

They seems like a quality vendor from initial reports, , so perhaps you
should email and ask about upgrades for your platform/Ubuntu.

My personal take is that they charge a little extra for their customized
install and integration effort. You could do the same by buying the
bare system and spending a few weeks of evenings to discover and install
the extra drivers and apps the platform supports and configuring these.
How much work that involves is very dependent on the system. Their cost
structure looks reasonable to me.

==

I'd also ask them abt the Vista install. I've read that Vista
installer gets cranky and fails when is sees Unix (ext2/ext3) partitions
in the partition table. I don't know (nor greatly care) what the
solution is, since I'm living Windoze-free, at least until tax time 2009.

-SteveA

[steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Fred Merchant wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm planning on buying a lap top real soon from Emperor Linux

> www.EmperorLinux.com <http://www.EmperorLinux.com>.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9781
I don't see it online, but LJ had a comparison of several laptops w/
Linux pre-installed.

[David D. Egts]

The good news is that this gets easier and easier as laptops are becoming more mainstream. Also, a lot of ultra mobile laptops run Linux preinstalled. I agree with Steve that if you get it from a vendor that specializes in this, you will get better support than supporting it yourself. Your call.

If you are doing it yourself, I'd recommend the Intel GPU and Intel wireless drivers. You could go with the ATI or NVIDIA proprietary gfx drivers, but you need to rebuild them usually every time there is a kernel update. There are 3rd party repositories which make it easier, but it's still not totally trivial. With the Intel gfx drivers, they are included in the prebuilt kernel package. For wireless, the ipw drivers work great. You could also use other wireless cards go with ndiswrapper and add in the Windows drivers, but the Intel drivers tend to be less effort (just install and go).

If you don't want a distro that evolves and end of life's rapidly, maybe take a look at one of the more enterprise like Linux distros where you can either purchase them or get a $0 community supported derivative. The down side is that you don't get the technology refreshes as quickly, but the benefit is that you aren't reinstalling and reconfiguring all the time. The quickly evolving distros have a lot of features that benefit laptop users however. Generally, the newer the distro, the better the laptop support will be.

You could also try out a live USB distro. That way you don't need to worry about installing it on your system. For example...

https://fedorahosted.org/liveusb-creator

Dave

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
David D. Egts
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
eg...@yahoo.com

----- Original Message ----
From: "steve-a...@adelphia.net" <steve-a...@adelphia.net>
To: Akro...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 19, 2008 12:36:59 PM
Subject: [ALUG] Re: Emperor Linux advice needed

Fred Merchant wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> I'm planning on buying a lap top real soon from Emperor Linux
> www.EmperorLinux.com <http://www.EmperorLinux.com>.
>

[rubbsdecvik]

Another thing to consider is that Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS release. That
means it will be supported for 3 years. You won't have to upgrade to
the new one if you don't want to.

System76 also has email support to the company. I've heard good
things about the support from System76, but I've never dealt with them
myself.

[Fred Merchant]

>Another thing to consider is that Ubuntu 8.04 is an LTS release. That
>means it will be supported for 3 years. You won't have to upgrade to
>the new one if you don't want to.

That's one of the reasons I'm looking at the Heron. I've had some experience with it and liked it -- except for the install where it asked some overly technical questions. (i.e. I formatted the wrong hard drive partition instead of the partition I intended to install to -- lost a lot of stuff! -- My bad.)

[Fred Merchant]

>http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/9781
>I don't see it online, but LJ had a comparison of several laptops w/
>Linux pre-installed.
>

I read that and forgot about it. Thanks for the reminder that it existed.

Fred

[Fred Merchant]

>Fred Merchant wrote:
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I'm planning on buying a lap top real soon from Emperor Linux
>> www.EmperorLinux.com <http://www.EmperorLinux.com>.
>>
>No experience, but these guys got positive reviews in a fairly recent
>Linux Journal comparing various laptop/tablet vendors. They seemed to
>have done a very good integration job - drivers for fingerprint scanners
>and apps for tablet writing recognition, wifi, built-in camera interface
>support, power management (hibernate/sleep). I imagine this sort of
>thing explains the custom kernel.
>

Thanks, Steve. I don't mind paying more for some experience. Reading their material I feel confident about getting a machine I won't have to fiddle with to get laptop features to work. I'll read your message in depth when I'm alone and away from my desktop.

[Fred Merchant]

>Fred --

>
>Los Alamos Computers
>(http://laclinux.com/).
>

>Alan
>
I'll read their material. Thanks.

[Fred Merchant]

I forget, are we supposed to "bottom post" answers? I don't usually do it, but with the replies I'm making I thought I better learn.

[Bill Mayhew]

You can also look at Dell. I've bought so-called, "Alternative
Operating System," computers from Dell that come with either DR-DOS or
Linux installed. They are the same as the Windows hardware, but less
expensive, because they don't come with the obligatory Windows
license. Ironically enough, be bought them to run Windows, but we
already had a volume license for Windows, and didn't feel like paying
twice for Windows.

It is hard to beat Dell equipment for reliability. Despite the knocks
Dell gets for phone support, I've always had good luck with them for
the extremely rare hardware problems (never a server, just a couple
desktop machines out of hundreds).

They might have sold them out by now, but Dell was having a fire sale
on SC-440 servers in the small business section of their web site -
basically a desktop with a few extra drive bays and a heavier power
supply. You can get it with Linux, if you want. Even supported with
Linux, if you want.

Bill

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

On October 2, Patrick Regan will give a presentation on tips for
training new Linux users. Some of us will have a direct need to train
Linux users at some point, but most of us could use some advice on how
to communicate and help Linux newbies take their first steps.

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Meeting announcement - sorry for the long delay, but I've been busy
with work.

The ALUG meeting, November 7 will be a show&tell and general
discussion of the new class of small ultra-mobile PC, typically Linux
based. Several members have offered to bring their umpc's and show
these off to the group.

Despite having speakers **tentatively** scheduled for all the meetings
through February , I'd sincerely like to have a few extra speakers
waiting in the wings. If you'd like to give a presentation OR if you
have an idea for a presentation that you'd like to see - please post
or email me.

Note: The January meeting is rescheduled from Jan 1 to Jan 8.

[Thomas Noe]

Is November's formal meeting on Thursday, November 6th or Friday, November 7th?

Thanks.

--

Best wishes,
Tom

[steve-a...@adelphia.net]

My apologies - the meeting in on THURSDAY Nov 6th as usual.
I'll update the webpage momentarily.
Apologies for the confusion.
-S

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

The meeting dates have been corrected on the webpage.

All formal meeting are the 1st Thursday of the month, as usual, with
the exception that the January meeting has been bumped from Jan1 to

[KD8GHD]

Just caught a typo; at the end of the homepage, describing the talk,
the microcontroller on the Arduinos is an Atmel AVR not a PIC.

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Next Thursdays ALUG formal meeting -

Don Parsons will discuss SIP telephony - a widely used VOIP protocol.

With a little luck and a wired connection we'll have a demo.

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Next meeting announcement is up.

*** January formal meeting is on *JAN-8* not JAN-1 ***
January Informal meeting is Jan 15. (3rd Thursday as usual).

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

ALUG speaker needed for March !

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Hi All,

Scott McCarty will present next Thursday on some Open Source
applications used in business. I think this will be very interesting
to personal Linux users, since it covers some interesting approaches
for network monitoring and management, Wiki and Apache, pre-
packaging installs with Kickstart and more .


-Steve

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

This Thursday, April 2nd

Installfest !!!!! Let's get everyone installed with a recent Linux
distro.

Grasshoppers -bring your hardware (and DVDs CDs, power strips)
Gurus - bring your selves and a favorite distro DVDs.

If anyone has a request to install a specific distro on their system -
please post to the maillist. If you are battling configuration of a
specific driver or device , plz post a note. This way the collective
can do a little homework before the meeting.
--
Anyone who cares to bring a show&tell item is welcome to take the
stage for a brief demo..

As always we are looking for speakers. Hey guys it's your club, and
if you haven't given a talk before - it's automatically your turn.
We'd all like to hear about your experience with a favorite package or
distro, or how you battled a config problem. A talk doesn't have to
be a Ph.D thesis - a nice description of a package or tool or distro
you like is an ideal topic.

[Donald Parsons]

On Tue, 2009-03-31 at 13:06 -0700, Steve-a...@adelphia.net wrote:
> This Thursday, April 2nd
>
> Installfest !!!!! Let's get everyone installed with a recent Linux
> distro.
>
> Grasshoppers -bring your hardware (and DVDs CDs, power strips)
> Gurus - bring your selves and a favorite distro DVDs.
>
> If anyone has a request to install a specific distro on their system -
> please post to the maillist. If you are battling configuration of a
> specific driver or device , plz post a note. This way the collective
> can do a little homework before the meeting.

I was just going to download the Fedora 11 Beta and realized I do not
know which of 32 or 64-bit distributions is wanted?

Today if you have a 64-bit capable CPU, you probably want the 64-bit
distribution. Exception might be if you have too little memory, say
512MB or less. And if you have over 2GB you want the 64-bit release.

So always mention the bit size capability of your CPU and amount of
memory if requesting a particular distribution for the install fest.
You can always just stick with 32-bit if you want.

You should also specify if you are limited to reading CDs only.

Or just bring the compatible media you wish to install from.

Don

[paron]

On Mar 31, 4:06 pm, Steve-alexan...@adelphia.net wrote:
> This Thursday, April 2nd
>
> Installfest !!!!!   Let's get everyone installed with a recent Linux
> distro.
>
> Grasshoppers -bring your hardware (and DVDs CDs, power strips)
> Gurus - bring your selves and a favorite distro DVDs.
>
> If anyone has a request to install a specific distro on their system -
> please post to the maillist.  If you are battling configuration of a
> specific driver or device , plz post a note.  This way the collective
> can do a little homework before the meeting.
> --

This might be pretty timely. I just dropped a SoundBlaster Audigy card
into my Ubuntu Studio 8.10 computer, and I haven't heard from it
since. I did follow a number of tutorials up to the point (near the
end) where they say, "This doesn't work in Ubuntu 8.10" or ". . .
except for the SoundBlaster Audigy," so I am completely lost.

I'm thinking of reinstalling the OS and all the printer drivers, etc.
that I just got working. Or, buying a Mac.

Ron

[David Egts]

On Tue, Mar 31, 2009 at 8:10 PM, Donald Parsons <dpar...@brightdsl.net> wrote:
> I was just going to download the Fedora 11 Beta and realized I do not
> know which of 32 or 64-bit distributions is wanted?
>
> Today if you have a 64-bit capable CPU, you probably want the 64-bit
> distribution.  Exception might be if you have too little memory, say
> 512MB or less.  And if you have over 2GB you want the 64-bit release.
>
> So always mention the bit size capability of your CPU and amount of
> memory if requesting a particular distribution for the install fest.
> You can always just stick with 32-bit if you want.

I'd recommend the 32 bit version if you don't expect the system to
have more than 4 GB over the life span that you will have the OS
loaded.

A lot of the desktop apps and plugins are 32 bit only for now. That's
slowly changing however. You can make it work with 64 bit, but it's a
little more manual work. If you don't think you are going beyond 4
GB, it may not be worth the trouble and may be better to keep it
simple and do 32 bit.

A 64 bit OS doesn't add much except for the ability to do 64 bit addressing.

To counter what I said above, I'd recommend the 64 bit version if you
are doing development where the target deployment platform is a server
with a 64 bit OS and you want the platforms to be the same. With
virtualization, you can have a 64 bit host and do 32 and 64 bit
guests, but with a 32 bit host, you are typically limited to 32 bit
guests.

Dave

[Patrick Regan]

Tonight, I think I'll download most of the major distros and bring a
bunch of blank CD's & DVD's. I can burn CD's on my laptop there. I
can not, however, burn DVD's on my laptop. I do have one at home
though, so if someone wants to make a request, I'm willing to burn
beforehand and bring it with me.

I probably will make some Virtual Machines of each, so if someone
wishes to, they can test drive before we burn.

On a more personal note, this might be an opportunity for me to try a
new distro. :)

On Apr 1, 9:38 am, David Egts <david.e...@gmail.com> wrote:

[stevea]

DaveE posts ...

> A 64 bit OS doesn't add much except for the ability to do 64 bit addressing.
>

There are some other differences Dave ....

Just to be contrary ... I have a few CPU intensive performance
benchmarks which run
quite a bit faster on X86_64 (one more than 2x!) than the 32bit
Fedora. A certain few
of the LMBENCH tests are faster too by perhaps enough to matter if you
are running
very compute intensive apps. A few of the file-syscalls are a bit
slower in 64bit (odd!).

You can install and run 32apps on the 64bit distro (if you have the
libraries). When
you do this you'll find (via LMBENCH) that most syscalls made by the
32bit apps to
the 64bit OS take a ~20% performance hit. Still it's fine for the
occasional 32bit binary
running on a 64bit Linux.

The MMU page handling on 64bit Linux is quite a bit faster than for the
32bit even
w/ the same amount of <4GB memory. 64bit seems to have smaller PTE
entry tables,
but I can't put my finger on the cause. When you fork a process the
64bit is much faster
even tho' this mostly just creates new table entries and marks the data
pages to
"split" on write.

Another difference - the RAM memory req is about 1.5-1.7 times higher
for 64bit !!!
I didn't believe this until I tested myself.

In the past ~year+ the added effort to maintain a 64bit install has
dropped - I believe
there are still issues if you insist on having the Sun Java development
package (but
there is OpenJDK - a close match). Most of the browser plugins are
either available
in 64bit or else the wrapper works. Very few problems anymore.

===
The short answer is still that most users want the 32bit Distros.

-S

[David Egts]

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 2:24 PM, stevea <steve-a...@adelphia.net> wrote:
> DaveE posts ...
>>
>> A 64 bit OS doesn't add much except for the ability to do 64 bit
>> addressing.
>>
>
> There are some other differences Dave ....
>
> Just to be contrary ... I have a few  CPU intensive performance benchmarks
> which run
> quite a bit faster on X86_64 (one more than 2x!) than the 32bit Fedora.

There are also 32 bit apps that run faster than their 64 bit counterparts.

Either way, depending upon what you are doing the performance
differences may or may not be noticeable. It all depends if your goal
is to do web browsing, to make Skynet self aware, or something in
between.

I wonder if this has to do with 64 bit pointer math and associated
storage vs. 32 bit. Just a thought.

>
> In the past ~year+ the added effort to maintain a 64bit install has dropped
> - I believe
> there are still issues if you insist on having the Sun Java development
> package (but
> there is  OpenJDK - a close match).  Most of the browser plugins are either
> available
> in 64bit or else the wrapper works.  Very few problems anymore.

I agree. The problem is becoming less of a struggle. In many cases,
it's still not transparent yet, but it'll get there as RAM gets
cheaper and cheaper.

>
> ===
> The short answer is still that most users want the 32bit Distros.

On the desktop, I'd agree (at this point in time). On the server, I'd disagree.

Dave

[steve-a...@adelphia.net]

David,

I generally agree w/ your performance comments. The avg end-user will
never notice the difference. A few syscalls fall ~20% on one side or
the other. If you run very compute intensive "data crunching" apps you
may be shocked that the performance improvement for 64bit. I've also
seen some cases where the 64bit OS was clumsy and slower and
manipulating 32bit quantities (cross compiles and interpreted languages
set for 32bit quantities for example). Net I'd have to declare 64bit
the performance winner, but it depends greatly on use.

> I wonder if this has to do with 64 bit pointer math and associated
> storage vs. 32 bit. Just a thought.
>

I perhaps, but that's a lot of native storage quantities to eat up 100's
of megabytes extra. ! ...

# size /lib/libm.so.6 /lib64/libm.so.6
text data bss dec hex filename
158021 344 64 158429 26add /lib/libm.so.6
528037 720 72 528829 811bd /lib64/libm.so.6

So WHY is the text section 3.5 times larger ??? Many libs are larger
like this, data sections too. Others libs are almost identical size.
Strange !

> On the server, I'd disagree.
>

We Agree, I meant "end users" as in the ALUG members in need of a Linux
install, should probably choose 32bit as a starting point. Compute
intensive apps, like data reduction of vid processing (not just floating
point) may work much better on 64b (but it depends).

[Tony Coffman]

FYI - Fedora 11 will install a 64 bit kernel if you have the hardware even if you install from the 32 bit CD.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/ArchitectureSupport

You get 64 bit memory support and the additional CPU registers without the user space bloat.

Regards,

--Tony

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

Next month at the May 7th meeting Michael Crute will present a short
overview of Python programming language and also present a real-world
example using Python as part of a search engine application.

[Steve Alexander]

Thanks in advance Michael ....
-Steve

[Steve-a...@adelphia.net]

At the upcoming meeting Terry Morris will compare OpenOffice and the
MS Word product.

[stevea]

Hi All,

I'm speaking on "bash as a programming language" at the next
meeting. Obviously we can only have an overview in an hour, but I
hope to present some bash features that are not widely known to the
average shell user.

As we enter Q3-09 we are once again extremely short on speakers,
starting wit hthe August 6 and Sept 3 meetings. If anyone would care
to volunteer or suggest a topic .... please let me know.

-SteveA

[flyingtiger]

Oh great! I was hoping the meeting would not be rescheduled due to the
holiday weekend.
Now, I need to find transportation to the meeting. My car is in the
shop. Hopefully I will see
you all tonight.
Terry - KB8AMZ

[Patrick Regan]

There was a lot of interest in different types of processors and their
advantages and disadvantages. I could do one on that sometime.

I also could do one on OpenMP and MPI as multi-threaded/multi-host
processing. That would get rather technical and not be as applicable
to most people however.

One idea I has was that if we could get about 5-10 people to each
review a website they use a lot, it might give some people some new
resources on FOSS news and support. We could review sites like
Linux.com, Ubuntu/fedora forums, and Phoronix.

I'll try to think of a few more ideas for tonight.

Pat

[stevea]

We have a nice schedule of speakers for upcoming months.
http://groups.google.com/group/AkronLUG/web/alug-home-page

In August Pat Regan will talk about the processor architectures/
features/differences. In September Scott McCarty will describes some
methods for administration of systems and automating the process. In
October Dave Egts will share a presentation he is preparing for RedHat
on Linux filesystem, including the newer ext4 and btrfs file systems.

November an December for '09 are open, if you have a talk in mind.

-Steve