The Open Pitt What's Cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 9 February 2005
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The Open Pitt What's cooking in Linux and Open Source in Western Pennsylvania Issue 9 February 2005 www.wplug.org Wireless Tunes by Drew Celley I've heard it said that one in ten Amer- I had to scan the dial with a couple icans has an MP3 player of some sort. of radios to find a quiet spot on the Hot Off the Grill... That's a pretty big number, though I'm FM dial which would let me hear it Recent software releases not one of them. Why wouldn't I have clearly enough. The Tunecast is most Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 revision 4 an MP3 player? I built my own port- useful in this scenario, because it lets was released on January 1. This up- able radio station instead. you choose the transmission fre- date adds security and bug fixes to I was inspired by a Wired article quency across the range of 88-108 the stable “woody” series. about the Radio Re-Volt project at the Mhz. Most little FM jobs for MP3 Mandrakesoft announced on Walker Art Center in Minneapolis players do one of 4 stations, and they January 4 the availability of two new <http://projects.walkerart.org/radio/> don't have a backlit LCD display. products: Corporate Desktop 3.0 where people are creating their own After all this, I plugged the Tun- and Corporate Server 3.0. Featur- radio stations using tiny inexpensive ecast into my laptop and fired up my ing the 2.6 Linux kernel and a 5-year transmitters and a little creativity. favorite player. It just plays, and the support lifetime, they are intended to The FCC is quite prohibitive when it Tunecast converts the audio signal compete in the marketplace with the comes to broadcasting in commercial from the headphone jack into an FM major enterprise distributions. airspace, so while I will skip over the radio signal. From there, I use a $4 The FreeBSD Project released free-speech activism issue, I suggest FM radio and a pair of headphones FreeBSD 4.11 for i386 and Alpha ar- everyone do a quick bit of reading and can navigate up to about 50 feet chitectures on January 25. It is mov- through their message boards, under- away without too much interference. ing to “Errata Branch” status with stand the issues, and and read what If you're interested in simulating a only well-tested fixes to be distrib- other bloggers have to say about it be- real radio station, take a look at uted hereafter. New development fore powering up your transmitter. <http://ross.sourceforge.net/>. has been shifted to the 5.x branch. After reading the above and doing a It's got lots of good links and discus- Despite his recent illness, Patrick little bit of research, I found instruc- sion about open source software for Volkerding put out Slackware 10.1 tions at Jiggybyte on how to hack a radio automation and related topics. I on February 2. It includes the latest popular MP3 player accessory, the am kind of excited about using Fest- versions of X11R6 and KDE and Belkin Tunecast II FM transmitter ival's text-to-speech synthesizer for fully supports both the 2.4.29 and <http://www.jiggybyte.com/tunecast.htm>. RSS feeds between songs, à la 2.6.10 kernels. I went promptly to EBay and bought a <http://geekradio.sourceforge.net/>. used one for under $20. When it ar- Lucky for me, nobody knows my rived, I immediately cracked it open, tiny $4 FM radio isn't an MP3 player, Coming Events cut out the antenna wire, and soldered and I think I like it that way. Feb. 19: Tutorial, Topic: System a full wavelength-long piece of wire Drew Celley lives on the South Side and Administration. 10AM to 3PM, onto the thing (about 9 1/2 feet), using runs wifimaps.com and pghwireless.net. 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU the instructions from Jiggybyte as a He has written for O'Reilly and Associ- Mar. 5: Central Pennsylvania guide. ates and other publications. Linux Users Group Security January Roundup Conference. 10AM to 6:30PM, Jan. 15 General User Meeting: Ryan opment; a crash will take down the Messiah College, Grantham, Brown of The Burgh Live spoke guest, but not the whole machine. Or PA (registration required) about User Mode Linux (UML). you can divide a large server into vir- <http://cplug.net/conference/> UML is “Linux on Linux”—it allows tual hosts and safely give customers Mar. 12: Installfest. 10AM to 5PM, you to run multiple guest instances of root access to the guests. Ryan 1507 Newell-Simon Hall, CMU the Linux kernel as if they were ordin- covered issues like selecting a root Mar. 19: General User Meeting. ary userspace programs. This can be filesystem, networking, and utilities 10AM to 2PM, 1507 Newell- useful if you are doing kernel devel- for administration. Simon Hall, CMU The Burgh Live - <http://www.tblive.com/> The public is welcome at all events Page 2 The Open Pitt February 2005 Linux in All the Unusual Places The Open Pitt is published by It's no secret that most desktop PCs Laptops, Laptops, Laptops the Western Pennsylvania Linux are capable of running Linux. Here If HP's limited offering doesn't satisfy Users Group we review some other places it's being you, here are three other sources for <http://www.wplug.org/top/> used—or can be made to run. your mobile Linux fix: Linare, Linux Certified, and EmperorLinux. They Editors: Elwin Green IBM sell either whitebox laptops with Vance Kochenderfer In late 2000, IBM made big headlines Linux newly installed, or name-brand What is Linux? by announcing a billion-dollar invest- laptops which have had that other op- Linux is a kernel, the core of a computer oper- ating system, created by Linus Torvalds. It is ment in Linux development. They erating system replaced with Linux. typically packaged as a distribution, which in- followed this up by supporting Linux The founder of EmperorLinux boasts cludes the extra programs necessary to make a across all their server lines, up to and a collection of thousands of “De- computer functional and useful. Since 1991, it has grown from a one-man project which ran including zSeries mainframes. Now signed for Microsoft Windows” stick- on one computer to one with thousands of con- IBM is offering two Linux-only serv- ers, each one ripped from a laptop he's tributors running on everything from personal ers: the OpenPower 710 and 720. rescued. <http://www.linare.com/> organizers to million-dollar supercomputers. Based on IBM's POWER5 processors <http://www.linuxcertified.com/> <http://www.emperorlinux.com/> What are Open Source and Free Software? and starting at under $5,000, these are Open Source and Free Software provide you, squarely aimed at the small and medi- the user, with the opportunity to see the source um business market. Your choice of TiVo code of the programs you use. You are free to SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server or Only a small percentage of the hun- use it, share it with others, and even make dreds of thousands of TiVo owners changes to it if you wish. While the Free Soft- Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be pre- ware and Open Source communities differ in loaded. know—or care—that the box on top their philosophical approach, in practical terms of their television set has a custom- they share nearly identical goals. Learn more at <http://www.opensource.org/> Silicon Graphics ized Linux distribution under the hood. All they know is that it works. and <http://www.gnu.org/>. SGI has put a great amount of effort But there are always those who don't into its high-performance Altix line, This newsletter was produced using Open believe in leaving well enough alone, shipped standard with Linux. The Source and Free Software. and they've set up sites like Altix features a NUMA (non-uniform <http://www.tivofaq.com/hack/>, Copyright 2005 Western Pennsylvania Linux memory access) architecture where Users Group. Any article in this newsletter <http://www.tivocommunity.com/>, each processor has memory that is may be reprinted elsewhere in any medium, and <http://tivo.samba.org/> to local to it, but still available to other provided it is not changed and attribution is share their hacks. Perhaps the most given to the author and WPLUG. CPUs. This falls somewhere in common is to increase a TiVo's capa- mind. Terra Soft Solutions offers its between an SMP (symmetric multi- city with a larger hard drive, but you newly-released Yellow Dog Linux processing) machine where all CPUs can also run arbitrary Linux binaries. 4.0.1 distribution dual-booting with share a common memory pool and a Mac OS X on the iMac, Power Mac, Beowulf cluster, where each node has iBook, PowerBook, Xserve, and even its own separate memory. The Altix Linksys Like the TiVo, the user interface the new Mac mini! is geared towards scientific computing <http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/> applications. WPLUGers had the op- presented by the Linksys WRT54G wireless router doesn't betray the fact portunity to see an Altix 350 when iPod M c a l S o v o r u h n o that it's running Linux. While its lim- i h e k w r n b o g t o e t When first released, the iPod only show off at the January meeting. ited processing power and memory mean that you won't be using it for worked with Mac machines, and now has Windows support.