Club Linux Coffs Harbour

We have submitted a team for Software Freedom Day 2008. Its going to be low key this year...not too taxing. We will obtain some Ubuntu CDs plus the Ubuntu Educational add-on to send out to secondary schools throughout the region. It will also be accompanied with other resources that can be used in the class room.

If you would like to get involve please contact me at paul[at]coffswifi[dot]net

Somebody's just asked via email whether there is a GNU/Linux users' group in the Grafton area. I'm sure I've met GNU/Linux users from Grafton from time to time, but my memory is failing me. Anybody know of a group, or just a person or two?

Jost recieved this via email:

My name is Donovan Craig, I'm a founder of Go4 Multimedia . We've recently re-located our business to Bellingen and have an office here on Hyde St.

At the moment we have a Linux Administrator/PHP developer position vailable (which we're hoping to become full time for the right person).

The following strengths are required:

- Linux shell experience (ie: bash)
- Some development experience ie: one of perl/PHP/Java - Understanding of protocols such as POP3, SSH, SMTP etc.
- Previous experience managing hosting environments is an advantage.

Decent web hosting at a price is difficult. There's no shortage of competition on price, but the 'decent' bit seems quite a bit harder.

Low priced hosting is shared hosting. That means you get, typically, a share of an Apache server, usually with quite a few other people, maybe hundreds.

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

My old Dell Inspiron 8500 beast has carked it, so I'm in the market for a new lappy. I'll do my usual humming and hah'ing for a few weeks then eventually by some other boring hunk of plastic and wires. In the meantime would anyone like to entertain me with suggestions of what I should buy? My needs are pretty basic up to a point. 90% of the time I'm in a web browser 9% of the time I'm editing text/code and 0.9% of the time I'm watching Dr. Who, The IT Crowd or some other teev.

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

Hi All,

Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.

I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:

http://www.diva-project.org/

Jesse, whom some of us met on Software Freedom Day, made the trip up from Kempsey for the last meeting and has a nasty problem. The problem was with a proprietary operating system, but as the solutions to problems with proprietary software almost universally involve free software, I think it's appropriate to ask for help here.

The symptoms sound very much like a screwed up partition table. The suspicion is that the cause was some sort of trojan that was delievered as an alleged "patch" to some proprietary software for MS Windows. After installing this software, Windows spontaneously rebooted (nothing unusual in that), but on boot-up the computer could find no bootable partitions. On further examination, there was no evidence of any partitions at all. Here's my list of possible solutions; please add any others that come to mind below.

Slashdot has been discussing this article:

Becoming a Linux OEM: A Roadmap

Which got me thinking... The Mid-North Coast could really do with a computer recycler. Matthew mentioned Computerbank, they seem to have a few outfits around the place but none that I know hereabouts. The general idea is to get old computers, stick linux on them and get them back into the community for as little money as possible!
Simple hey?