Members  attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan Shoemaker, Don Evinger, Dave Reisz,  Kandy Phan,  Ken Howells, Mac Shaver, Klaus Herzog, Jim Lucha, Hung Nguyen,  and  Forrest Sherman.   New members, Ossil Macavinta, Dana Rodden Dick Mathews, Mark DiNicolai and Karl Pomroy  were unable to make the meeting.  Hopefully they will be able attend our February meeting.  Also missing at this meeting were Tad Peters, Isaac Saldana, and Craig Carignan.

Jim was attending his first LUGIE meeting this time.  He is a Programmer/Analyst with the San Bernardino Medical Group
{E-Mail: lucha@pe.net} who says..."Linux: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware"

Alan Shoemaker, Forrest Sherman and Don Evinger told members about a recent project to set up Mandrake 8.0 using a Highpoint ATA-100 RAID {see: http://www.hothardware.com/hh_files/Motherboards/SE6BX133RAID.htm   A similar problem may also exist with the promise controller.   It seems that the partition numbering established during the install was changed when the system restarted at the end of the procedure.  As a result Lilo had to be changed to allow it to boot normally.  Forrest mentioned his Promise IDE RAID {mirror stripe} lost a drive.  He couldn’t determine which of the two was damaged, but both were rebuilt off-line.   There was some speculation that if the master dirve fails it may take the slave also.

  Alan reported that in installing Mandrake-8 on his all SCSI system he encountered a similar problem to one that exists in Red Hat 7.1.  The distribution CD image won’t allow it to boot using a SCSI controller.  A new image is available to resolve the problem.  He also mentioned that Mandrake includes legacy libraries, so that you can install and run packages from Mandrake 7.1 on a Mandrake-8 system.

  Alan still hasn’t resolved the SEG FAULT he got when he tried to install Slackware.  Several members suggested several ideas to help determine if he possibly had a memory problem.  One suggestion was a memory-testing program available at: http://freshmeat.net/projects/memtest86/ …, which may help, identify a bad chip.

  Mac Shaver told members that PacBell is taking a look at replacing their SPARC-20  systems and are considering Sun Blades/Solaris-8 or IBM Intelli-Stations running Win-2k.  In the area of interesting developments, Mac also members take a look at: http://www.jabber.com/index.shtml  which is a Instant Messaging Solutions for Enterprises and Service Providers Jabber is a revolutionary new real-time communications platform based upon open protocols and XML. Whether you're looking to deploy a branded Instant Messaging service or you need a flexible and extensible development tool for real-time XML messaging, look no further. Jabber.com provides scalable, commercial-grade Jabber software, solutions, and professional services based upon technologies of the Jabber Open Source movement.  A major point is that it can work with instant messaging clients except AOL, to communicate with people on other services. 

  Mac also reported that Microsoft is working on HailStorm, which will use IM Client Banner Advertising to generate revenue for IM service providers who participate in the consortium.   HailStorm is Microsoft's code name for a set of user-oriented Web services that the company plans to begin delivering by the end of June.  A report by IDG News service at: http://www.itworld.com/AppDev/1473/pcwnws-010320-hailstorm/ indicated that there “were commitments by Gates and other company executives to support access to the HailStorm services from any device. They demonstrated those services running on a Palm PDA, a Pocket PC, and a RIM Blackberry handheld, as well as on a Sun Microsystems workstation running Sun's Solaris Unix and on a PC running Red Hat Linux.”

  In the week before our meeting there was a thread on the list about “dual boot” problems using Win/ME. Ken Howell’s reported his solution, rather than dual boot is his “Zip Slack” disk.  If the disk is first formatted for 100mb on his 250mb Zip at work the same Zip Slack Linux will work on either type drive.  If this sounds interesting, talk to Ken he may be willing to share a copy with you, or you can download your own at: http://www.byte.com/feature/BYT19990824S0023   It is a little-known distribution of Linux (Zipslack) that can install itself onto a DOS partition and co-exist gracefully with DOS. It contains full C, C++, and Perl development environments in addition to a full set of documentation, but doesn't have any unneeded fluff.  Based on Slackware Linux v2.2, it will not give you a high-performance Linux implementation. The DOS filesystem is slow. It is not as rugged as a Linux filesystem. But it does work.

The ensuing discussion of other alternatives like “Tom’s Root Boot” {see: http://www.toms.net/rb/ } brought up a recommendation for “Rip Rescue” see: http://www.icewalk.com/softlib/app/app_01235.html  which is a Small Linux system for the purpose of system booting or repairing, a boot/rescue system. You can put this system on a 1.44mb formatted floppy or cdrom disk, it will probably also boot from a LS-120 drive with a 1.44mb floppy. It's more or less designed for non-networked stand-alone home pc hard drive boot / rescue / backup! It has large filesystem support, you can use the programs dd, mke2fs, mkdosfs, mkreiserfs, split, mount, tar, gzip, and bzip2 with files bigger than 2GB. It includes the partition resizing program parted and the mc file manager!

Forrest also reported on a Dyanmic DNS service called Hammernode that is provided to help host websites on home/business computers that are stuck with dynamic IP addresses.  If this sounds like something you need check out: http://hn.org/faq.orientation.html   

There was a lot more, but as is sometimes true  "you had to be there".  The meeting was a great success and we are all looking forward to next month's meeting on June 9th.