During last month's meeting, Danny Yee gave us some insight into his work as a volunteer for Community Aid Abroad, and how he's promoting Free Software there on moral grounds - not just because it works better!

Check out Danny's (very cool) webpage for more info.

Later, Charlie Brady posted an update to the list, mentioning that Community Aid Abroad's web server - a lowly 486 with 16MB of RAM - happily pushes out around a gig a month:

Anand posted some links regarding IPv6 and Jason's funky software for this month, BubbleMon, which Anand has packaged for Debianites here.

Minh Van wondered how to execute binary files and scripts in the current directory, asking why the inclusion of "." (the current directory) in the path was considered dangerous. John Ferlito replied (with a bit of editing from Ian Tester):

He suggested using $HOME/bin to make life easier and prevent problems at the same time.

Anthony Rumble posted, Does anyone feel it's time for a best-of-slug list? I'm missing important posts to the list, because of the signal to noise. Anyone else feel the same way? Who would volunteer to be the sacrificial lamb/s to do the moderating?

...starting the longest thread of the week in the process!

There was a short on-topic debate about whether this would work. Jeff Waugh said that most new list requests never eventuated because no one could agree on a format, and there's always posting confusion. Anthony replied, No, Thats not how it works. best-of-* lists have one or more people who "scan" the main list, and forward "good" posts to the best-of-* list. There are many high bandwidth lists that do this already.. like "ausrave" and the linux kernel lists.

Adam Kennedy suggested a mailing list summary - much like the Kernel Cousins, and as it turns out, there was some discussion about this at the recent meeting. Matt Allen volunteered to help out with the website, so Jeff asked for a bit of input into what everyone would like to see on the site.

Paul Robinson replied with a lengthy list of ideas, including:

• User registration and a member's section
• Threaded "mailing list interface" - as opposed to a simple archive
• A web-to-list gateway (kind of like DejaNews)
• Administrator's interface to best-of-slug selection
• Best-of-Slug only selection for users

There was no reply. Paul, you may want to check out eGroups.com, who do a similar thing, plus more. Many mailing lists pipe their mail there as a simple way of doing most of what you've mentioned. Unless there have been any big changes, eGroups use Linux too!.

David Kempe brought up the notion of problem/solution pairs, and DIY moderation, where the posters of problems reply back to the list with the best solutions, But for me, the signal is in the problem/solutions that come out of the list. You know, oh thats a neat way of doing that, oh shit I better patch that, or yeah im glad someone asked that stupid question. So I reckon the best of slug would be user contributed, to give the people who have problems a chance to put something back.

Sonam Chauhan suggested a Hypermail/SWISH combo to fulfil our long time need for a good, searchable archive, and a specially hacked version for the best-of-slug list. Anand Kumria replied, voicing the too-many-CC's argument when implementing a separate optional list. Terry Collins and Sonam worked on getting SWISH going for Terry's archive.

Jon Biddell not only wanted a searchable SLUG archive, but SLUG HOWTO's as well! There was a bit of discussion about the quality and audience of HOWTO's, ending with Jon's link to the venerable Irish Linux Users Group website.

Jeffrey Borg came up with a unique solution to the problem:

Matthew Dalton posted the obligatory "Use Google!™" response, but also mentioned Search Linux, an archive of Linux usenet posts.

David Kempe didn't think that an online archive was the magical solution we're all looking for, and that it just required a bit of nous to discern the signal from the noise.

Conrad Parker agreed,

Sonam obviously really wanted a threaded archive, and also an automated FAQ. Jeff replied that there was in fact a threaded view for our archive at ProgSoc and that the FAQ was on its way. Anand asked for input on the format of the list, and decided to test swish++ after finding out it was Free Software.

Jeff volunteered to do at least the first SLUG Pearls, though there was some "debate" about the name. Suggestions included Pearls, Pellets, Pullets, Trails and Entrails, with Jamie Honan somehow implying a Bjelke-Peterson connection!

Perhaps a vote is in order. ;)

Doug Stalker asks, Using linux, how do I wipe a HD completly clean and then verify it has no bad sectors? Also, what is the best way to produce an exact copy of a HDD? (Assuming they are the size size/format drive and they are both connected to teh one system)

Rick Welykochy solved the formatting and testing side of things:

whilst Chuck D covered mirroring:

Terry Collins wondered if he could copy CDs for backup purposes,

John Clarke posted a user-friendly script that prompts you though the process of copying a CDROM, and Jason gave the following solution:

John Ferlito added that the extra losetup commands were unneccesary if you mount the file using: mount -t iso9660 -o loop /opt/cd.img /mnt/cdrom

Conrad posted an email from a journalist looking for Linux users, "unsophisticated when it comes to computers but maybe tried Linux because they were curious to learn more about it." Jamie had an example he prepared earlier, Would my ten year old daughter who uses hotmail, plays web games, X based games and railroad tycoon qualify?

We widely agreed that she was overqualified, with Peter Samuel asking for a resume. Terry was worried about more important matters, I hope she is too young to come to the games fest.
It's bad enough loosing my pocket money to the 8year old next door in fish, but loosing at computer games - sheesh. {:-)

...and the challenge is on?

Ben Donohue's kernel had a panic when he deleted a partition between distant /boot and / partitions. DaZZa knew what was going on:

This solution worked fine.

David Sainty was looking for Linux notebook, and was after one which:

Matt Allen was very happy with both his Dell notebook, and their service. Jon Biddell had a good story about his experience with Gateway:

Most agreed that they were very happy with their Dell machines, and there were more Gateway experiences, all negative.

David is sticking to his principles and looking for a Dell.

Terry wondered Toshiba notebooks could handle Linux, saying that he could sell them sans "The Microsoft Tax" - and luckily for us, they can handle the penguin!

Simon Rumble asked:

Del offered:

To which Jeffrey Borg added,

As if we didn't love the Australian Tax Office enough already, David reported that he received a "Gates Hegemony"-only tutorial CD, hoping they'd subsidise a computer on which he could run it.

Graeme Merrall wondered if Win4Lin would suffice, which both Anthony Rumble and Jason Rennie assumed to be the case. If Office runs...

David Sainty brought up GnuCash, asking if it were GST compliant, and whether there was an Australian OS project to add the functionality. Terry Collins informed that GnuCash wasn't really up to the task, but another piece of Free Software - GNU Enterprise - was building up to it rapidly.

Conrad provided more info on GnuCash:

Simon Bryan set the scene for one of SLUG's favourite pastimes: Obfuscated, Efficient & Esoteric Scripting 101, asking:

Our first contestant is Adam Kennedy:

Who gets points for a quick flame, but none for his looong solution! :) Other Perl devotees included Rodos:

Sorry, Rodos - too late! Obfuscation is the name of the game! :) Tony Cook also responded to Adam's entry:

Rodos:

Who says you can't learn anything from these things? Fancy a bit of sed? Matthew Dalton:

James Morris:

Next up, Anthony Rumble with awk:

Quickly plumbed for efficiency by John Ferlito:

But the most impressive entry of all was from Herbert Xu:

Which floored everyone... Anthony Rumble:

Doug Balmer was obviously stunned:

CaT:

But Herbert had another trick up his sleeve: A shell-only solution!

while read LINE; do
    echo ${LINE%%:*}
done

But was Simon happy with the responses?

Perhaps we should leave the end of the thread to Rick and Matt:

John Ferlito was interested in finding out the differences between the two products, having found VMWare to be quite slow. Anand gave the best description: