September 2006 - wlug - list.wlug.org.nz

Linux Client Migration Cookbook
by Martin, Anthony (NZ) 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

"Linux Client Migration Cookbook" available for download IBM has published a final draft of its "Redbook" titled Linux Client Migration Cookbook, Version 2: A Practical Planning and Implementation Guide for Migrating to Desktop Linux. The 376-page book, which targets enterprises needing to begin an evaluation of desktop Linux, is available for free download. <http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS5790800597.html>

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Problem with Google Earth Updating
by Leslie Katz 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

Thanks very much to both Simon and zcat for taking the trouble to reply to my query. I began by trying zcat's solution (merely editing my .bashrc to change Firefox to firefox) and it worked, so it seems as though some PATH designation already supplied the necessary path. Funny about that capitalisation. Like many things, it's so obvious, once someone else has the wit to point it out! Thanks again, Leslie

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Correction re AGM
by Craig Box 20 Sep '06

20 Sep '06

The regular meeting location is room TW2.07, not room LitB, at the University of Waikato. Sorry for causing confusion. Craig

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REMINDER: Annual General Meeting, 2 October
by Craig Box 19 Sep '06

19 Sep '06

In accordance with Rule 6 of the charter, I would like to announce to all members that the Waikato Linux Users Group (Incorporated) will be holding its Annual General Meeting on Monday, 2 October, 2006, at 7pm, at the regular meeting location of room LitB at the University of Waikato. New committee ============= All WLUG members are encouraged to stand for election onto the WLUG committee for 2007. The charter specifies the committee as consisting of a President, Vice President, Secretary, Treasurer, and three general committee members. To stand for the committee, please email secretary(a)wlug.org.nz. If you wish to nominate someone, please contact them and ask if they are willing to stand; if you would rather not contact them yourself, feel free to email me and I will pass your request on for you. People with uncertain futures (who may be leaving the Waikato) are encouraged not to let this stop them standing for election, but please only stand if you are committed and prepared to take on a relatively small workload. To be granted voting rights at the meeting, you must have been a paid member for 2005-2006, and signed a new membership form for '06-'07. (Remember, you have 90 days to pay.) Regards, Craig WLUG Secretary

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Problem with Google Earth Updating
by Leslie Katz 19 Sep '06

19 Sep '06

When I try the above from within the application, I get the following message: "Could not launch any web browser. Please make sure you have set the $BROWSER environment variable to the name of the filename we should launch!" When I issue the command "env", among the output, I find the following: "BROWSER=Firefox" Why is that not sufficient for Google Earth's purposes? Do I need to add a version reference or some other thing?

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Software Freedom Day Event
by Lindsay Druett 17 Sep '06

17 Sep '06

Hi There, From what I have seen and heard, the feedback has been awesome. I'm still getting up to speed as to what other LUGs and other groups have done to celebrate Software Freedom Day, but on the whole, from what I have seen looking at the software freedom webpage, I feel very confident to say that ours was world class and we gave awesome open public exposure to open source software. There are photos of the event that took place online, look at http://softwarefreedomday.org/gallery/2006/gallery/2006/oceania/nz/hamilton Thankyou all who got involved in making this event happen. I would like to this opportunity to single out three people out who did an outstandingly stunning job of making this happen... Craig Box, Ian McDonald, and Bruce Kingsbury. Without you guys, this event would not have happened. I would also like to thank Sue Kingsbury, Bruce's wife who supported Bruce, and also Cairo and Destiny, Bruce's daughters, who took turns dressing up as Tux, I think it was mostly Cairo. And, I would also like to thank our supporters... IT Partners (http://www.itpartners.co.nz/) for the loan of the computers WAND Group (http://wand.cs.waikato.ac.nz/) for loan of the TV and other bits and pieces Gateway Christian Centre (http://www.gateway-net.com/) for the loan of the tables and chairs Mystique Costume Hire who made the Tux Penguin Suit especially for us and also Telecom, Centreplace/Downtown Plaza management. Furthermore, I would also like to thank those who helped behind the scenes, those who came on the day, demonstrated open source software and shared their experiences with OSS, and also Ron Dean particularly, but others who have taken photos of the event that has taken place. I would like to take an opportunity to make comment that Open Source Freedom day is about celebrating and putting a day aside to promote free and open source software, however, it is not a day to be seen as a day put aside, or a an event to be held on that day, where there is open season to denigrate vendors, in particular Microsoft, who choose the copyright and charge out a licence fee on a per user and/or per seat basis. Hey, excellent work... Regards, Lindsay Druett, WLUG President.

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Problem Installing Democracy Player
by Leslie Katz 16 Sep '06

16 Sep '06

Thanks to both of you for your replies. I should've said in my original post that I had already installed pyrex, without overcoming the error message about Pyrex.Distutils by doing so. I apologise for that omission, which was caused by my being a bit flustered. However, something written by Dominic reminded me of an earlier occasion on which I sought help on this list regarding a python script. The person who kindly helped me then pointed out that installing python2.4, while not uninstalling python2.3, wouldn't, of itself, help me to run a script that said it required python2.4. Python2.3 was being used as the default version on my system, so that I had to force the script to use python2.4. When I did that, the script worked. Since Dominic had told me that the Pyrex scripts should appear in /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages, I went looking, not there, but in /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages. Sure enough, that's where they'd been installed. I therefore copied Pyrex/ into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages and re-ran run.sh. On that attempt, there was no longer a complaint about the absence of the module Pyrex.Distutils. Instead, I got a different complaint further into the setup script, as follows: Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 175, in ? packages = getCommandOutput("pkg-config --list-all") File "setup.py", line 124, in getCommandOutput raise RuntimeError("%s outputted the following error:\n%s" % RuntimeError: pkg-config --list-all outputted the following error: Package dbus-1 was not found in the pkg-config search path. Perhaps you should add the directory containing `dbus-1.pc' to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable Package 'dbus-1', required by 'NetworkManager', not found I went looking on my system for RPMS with dbus in their name and found I had four of them. One in particular was called dbus-python-0.22-10.FC3.2.i386.rpm and I assumed it was the relevant one. I got a list of all the files in that package. There were six of them: dbus.py; dbus.pyc; dbus.pyo; dbus_bindings.a; dbus_bindings.la; and dbus_bindings.so. I went looking for those six files and found them all in /usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages. I therefore tried the same trick as I'd tried with the Pyrex directory, namely, copying all six files into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages, but the trick would only work once. When I re-ran run.sh, I still got the same error message I set out above. (It's those files with "binding" in their names that are causing the trouble, I suspect.) My current question, therefore, is how do I get into /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages copies of the dbus-python rpm's files that will work? One last thing. Craig raised a wry smile on my face by telling me upgrading was good. I've been wanting to upgrade for ages, but I'm too afraid. What I really need is a step-by-step guide in words of one syllable, explaining to me how to prepare for an upgrade, so that, after upgrading, I'll still have all my current data, my applications that I've separately installed and my settings for my current applications. Without that security blanket, I feel I'm stuck with FC3 indefinitely. Thanks again, Leslie

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Problem Installing Democracy Player
by Leslie Katz 15 Sep '06

15 Sep '06

Thank you to all of you who've offered help with this problem. I haven't given up yet and am slowly inching forward with the installation process. Now I've reached some problem about pygtk. Whether I'll ever get to the end of the process, I don't know, but, in the way of these things, I suppose that if I do, the application won't be much anyway. Oh well. Thanks again, Leslie

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Asterisk on a large site
by Ian McDonald 14 Sep '06

14 Sep '06

Replaces Cisco VoIP and PABX Interesting read: http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2006/091206-von-sam-houston.html?page=1 -- Ian McDonald Web: http://wand.net.nz/~iam4 Blog: http://imcdnzl.blogspot.com WAND Network Research Group Department of Computer Science University of Waikato New Zealand

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What is democracy player?
by Ian McDonald 14 Sep '06

14 Sep '06

Saw this today at lwn.net and thought it is timely given SFD. Democracy player 0.9 Last February, the Participatory Culture Foundation announced its existence with the launch of the "Democracy" player, billed as "the world's first comprehensive open source Internet TV system." Many Linux users may be excused for not trying out the program at that time; despite being a GPL-licensed program, Democracy had not been ported to the Linux platform. That situation has now changed; on September 11, Democracy 0.9 was announced. It runs on Linux, and packages for Debian, Fedora Core, Gentoo, and Ubuntu are provided; the source is available for everybody else. Beyond the Linux port, this version promises a polished user interface, a new playlist capability, Flash video support, and more. Your editor clearly had no choice; a tool like this simply must be tried out. Unfortunately, the Democracy experience is still rather spotty at best. It requires the installation of a number of proprietary codecs (which is not particularly surprising, once one thinks about it - the Democracy developers will have no magic solutions there). The system can be sluggish to respond, and your editor never was able to get it to display a video in its own window. It also would not explain why it failed to display anything, so there was little to be done about it. But your editor was able to get far enough to realize one important thing: video display is not really what Democracy is about in the first place. This tool is really a sort of video feed aggregator for free video content; it has all the required features around sorting feeds into categories, collecting votes for interesting videos, using BitTorrent to download videos in a provider-friendly way, and more. There is also significant support for people who want to create their own video feeds. What Democracy and its supporting foundation are trying to do is to get as many people as possible into the business of creating and distributing interesting content. The term "Internet TV" is somewhat off the mark - Democracy will suit couch potatoes just fine, but its real purpose is to get them off their couches and participating in the process. It is trying to create a world where video content is free, universal, and compelling - so it has tools for finding and distributing videos but a distinct lack of DRM support. This is an important goal - television is too important to leave to the TV companies. If the Democracy system can help to bring more free content into existence, it will have done good thing. Some progress in that direction has been made: there are, it is said, some 600 channels of free content available now, and, doubtless, more to come. The current code has real promise; it looks like a capable system for discovering, distributing, and managing interesting video content. If they can get past the remaining troublesome issues, the Democracy hackers will have created a valuable tool indeed.

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