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Ryedale Linux User Group Previous Meetings

I didn't make it to the August meet, so this write up has been kindly submitted by Paul Teasdale.

Sorry it's a bit late but here's a brief outline of Monday's meeting.  Four people turned up and they were Mike Drawneek, Neil Ballie, Martin Wheldon and myself [Paul Teasdale].

Initial discussion was wild and varied.  We got on about school exams as one topic because Neil worked for an exam authority in a past job.  Mike had not turned up at this point.

Also discussed was OSM and how N. Yorks is still a bit of a black spot (or white spot depending on the way you look at it).  It was also said that Malton was starting to fill in now so we put that down to you [Al Girling] ;)

Anyhow later on Mike turned up and conversation split.  Neil got talking to Mike and I was talking with Martin.  Don't know what their conversation was but Martin and I got on to Linux.  Things discussed were doing a minimal Debian install for use in Virtual Machines.  You may have seen Martin's directions for doing this on Tuesday.  Also discussed was some automated setup tool he uses called Puppet.  I still need to look at that.

Martin uses a virtual machine manager called OpenVZ, something else I need to look at.  The benefit of OpenVZ is that all virtual machine instances use one kernel where as the likes of VMWare, Xen and VirtualBox have a kernel per virtual machine which soon swamps a low resource PC.

Discussion then turned to Rsync.  This came about because I've been tinkering with it to allow like-for-like backups between one machine and antother.  Rsync is good for this because it has two really nice features.  (Well it actually has loads more but these impress me most).  1st feature is it can mirror files either locally or over a network.  Secondly and more impressively it will not copy files that have not changed but say you had a 640mb CD image and it had changed.  Then instead of copying the whole 640mb again it will analyse the file and copy the bits that have changed.  This sound like it would take a long time but it's actually so quick it's un-true.

Finally discussion got onto Software Freedom Day.  At this point Neil left and so did Martin not long afterwards.  (Mike and I stuck around until about 10:45pm and then we called it a day too).  Basically Mike wants to know if we want to do anything about it as a LUG.  He's booked a week in Scarborough library.  He will set up a stand, put some CDs on it and man it on evenings and Saturday.  Otherwise it will be left to it's own devices.

He was wondering if we want to setup something similar in Malton library.  I didn't give him an answer there and then because neither of us are from Malton and it's finding the time and doing the travel each night.  Mike has some resources and what not that he can help us with if we wanted to go ahead with something.