Club Linux Coffs Harbour

I didn't know it until about a month ago, but there's this thing called DVB-T, a standard for digital video broadcasts (the "DVB" bit) by terrestrial broadcasters (the "T" bit). You can get really cheap little USB devices to receive and decode these broadcasts, and Gary brought one of them in to the meeting before last.

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.

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.

This development makes me think of all those years reading HOWTOs and editing modelines and want to weep tears of joy:

I love the occasional Top 25 Linux Commands articles that come along. For one thing, it gives me another opportunity to be tiresomely pedantic and say they are not "Linux commands", but bash "builtin" commands, or standalone programs. I also invariably find one thing I never knew about, or had forgotten. In this case it was "history", a bash builtin that is faster to type than "cat ~/.bash_history".

Applications are now open for Google's [Northern] Summer of Code. If you are currently a student with aspirations to becoming a master programmer, this is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to an established free software project with guidance from some of the top people in free software. There are 135 mentor organisations participating this year, including projects like Debian, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Samba, and on and on. So no matter where your interests lie, you will probably find a project you'll want to work on.

Last year the SoC contributions to Drupal, the software my day job is built around, really helped push development of some major features. And many of the mentors from Drupal in 2006 were themselves student participants in 2005, so this is really a serious stepping stone to getting a career in free software development off the ground.

Oh, and Google pays you for your work! Beats stacking shelves in the supermarket to make ends meet. There are a lot of things you can criticise Google for, but on the strength of this program alone, they can justifiably claim to be not yet wholly evil.

Thought I should post links to some of the things we discussed at our last meeting. If you can remember something I've missed, add more in the comments.

Linux.com has reviewed the new releases from Mandriva and Ubuntu, both generally favourably. Mandriva's package management system(s) still appear to be letting it down, and Ubuntu "Edgy" disappoints for it's lack of "edginess". If you've used either, leave your impressions in the comments below.

Linux Edge looks at a very early and not-ready-for-prime-time version of the Hula Mail and Calendar Server, or at least it's web interface. Nat Friedman of Novell launched this project over a year ago, touting it as the mail and calendar server people will actually enjoy using. The caught my attention, as every existing product in this area that I've tried could most diplomatically be described as "challenging" to deploy (and not in a fun way).