[Cialug] April Meeting Notes

[cialug@cialug.org]

Meeting Notes 04/20/2005

MythTV
The majority of the discussion was tabled until next month.
Hauppauge cards are supported by most modern distributions.
See http://www.hauppauge.com for more details.
The Hauppauge PVR-150 is newer and cheaper than the PVR-250.  The PVR-350 has
an MPEG-2 hardware encoder and decoder, where the 250 and 150 decode in
software.  The PVR-150 and 350 have a hardware Video CD encoder, the 250 does
not.  PVR Cards are best for slower machines, but any TV tuner card will work
with MythTV, as long as there are Linux drivers for the card.  Without a PVR
card (or equivalent), you would probably need 1GHz or more.

MythTV Features:
Basic video editing
PIP support with more than one tuner
Rip and play music in MP3, OggVorbis, and other formats.
Picture Viewer
A front-end to play MAME, NES, SNES, and other games.
Weather module
For more, see http://www.mythtv.org/modules.php?name=MythFeatures 

Iowa Training Days
Josh More gave a Linux in Schools presentation
Makes sense in public schools, but makes even more sense in alternative schools.
Difference between training and educating: Training shows how to use software,
versus how they work so you can expand your knowledge beyond the training.
Find the presentation at:
http://www.starmind.org/Professional.White_Papers.Linux_In_Schools.html

System Monitoring Tools
BigBrother, Nagios, AWStats, Webalizer, and PHPMyStats were mentioned.  Nagios
is nice, but a giant pain to get running.  AWStats graphically shows what
pages are hit the most, from where, and the average download size.  This will
allow you to see if a lot of people are canceling the download, or are having
problems downloading.  Go to http://freshmeat.net/browse/245/ to see more log
analyzers.

Misc Info
http://www.novell.com/products/linuxprofessional/features/yast.html Suse and
Yast make installs easy.  For example, during an install, LDAP was setup
automatically.  Yast is a system installer, making easy setup DNS, DHCP, and
others.  It is not a package manager, but it does install packages via rpm.
http://www.bookpool.com for O'Reilly books where they often have a 43% off
sale.  Search for bookshelf to find O'Reilly CD Bookshelf titles.  These
titles include HTML, which is searchable.
http://www.digg.com People post interesting sites they've found, the posts get
"diggs" to move to the front page.
http://www.techbooksforfree.com A decent selection of tech books for free
viewing or download.
http://propel.phpdb.org Reads your DB schema and generates an XML file, and
spits out PHP code.
http://www.comfortkeyboard.com A keyboard that can be re-arranged in a
multitude of configurations.

Humor
http://www.gizoogle.com translates pages into urban language.
http://www.starmind.org/cgi-bin/mangle_phrase.cgi Translates a phrase into
various languages, and back to English.  Some very humorous translations!
Found at http://www.fark.com: An April Fools day column where Star Trek fans
had a re-enactment of a Civil War battle.  See
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/news/columnists/tim_chitwood/11281515.html
for more.

Cooperative Asterisk
Qwest PRI: $585/month for a 3-year term.  Has a max of 23 simultaneous
connections.
Dave W. has a dual PII 450MHz server.
Dave W. would cover half of the cost, at about $300/month.
Others would have to make up the difference.  For example, for $10/month,
would require 30 people to sign up.
There would not be E911/911 service.  The reason is the fire department would
go to the co-location, not your house.  A small asterisk server can run on a
WRT54G router.
http://www.asterisk.org
Everyone would need an IAXy to plug a phone into it.
http://www.digium.com


--
Tim W.