Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Co-oincidental to research I'm presently doing on creating control and monitoring systems with web interfaces, I came across an incredible array of miniature computers running Linux or other tinier open source operating systems.

Of general interest, I think to pretty well everyone, would be the Sheeeva Plug, at an amazing US$99 with Linux, 1.2G processor and 512M RAM, together with 512M Flash RAM for website or other storage space. It's also "green" as it consumes less than 5W power.

David from Grafton asked if it's possible to run multiple Live CD images off a single DVD. A bit of Googling turned up these articles:

• Creating a Multi-boot DVD

• MultiCD Builds a Multi-boot CD / DVD With Many Different Linux Distributions And / Or Utilities

Let us know if either is helpful, David.

I attempted to use the 'AusKey Secure Identity Data Exchange Thingy' only to find it does not work with GNU/Linux. I emailed them to let them know about their broken system and just recieved this cut&paste response:

The AUSkey solution currently does not support the Linux platform. This is consistent with other ATO systems.  The 'technical information' link on the AUSkey site outlines the operating systems and browsers that are officially supported.

As I feared, we have to postpone the June meeting for a week. Sorry about that. I shall try to contact everybody via Robert's mailing list, but if you bump into a fellow ClubLinuxer during the week, please check they know about the postponement.

Using my little computer which has the cpu capacity of a very stupid weevil I find it quicker to avoid too much GUI.

So, lets get to the point:

Navigate to the directory which contains the offending FLAC files and copy this in:

for file in *.flac; do $(flac -cd "$file" | lame -h - "${file%.flac}.mp3"); done

You'll get an error if you don't have lame or flac installed. So install them and try again. Done. Easy.

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Maybe some of you use Twitter to micro-blog all that overflowing brain blather. Maybe you don't. Either way I have a suggestion, go create an account on our very own local Microblog. We can chat to each other or just share info about stuff that we want to share. It'll be fun.

If you are still not convinced here are some benefits:

• Can easily set it to auto-forward to your Twitter or Facebook account
• It is Open and Free
• It is managed by us, not some billionaires in North America
• It has a bunch of bananas on it

Click the bunch of bananas and join in the conversation.

My studious partner wants to listen to a Latin podcast on her audio player. She has a bit of catch up to do, there are hundred probably thousands of mp3 files to download. Now I know there are all kinds of graphical download plugins and managers I could use but I prefer something a bit quicker and more simple.

There has been some discussion around editing your videos and I'm hopefully reporting an exciting new development for 2010. No not the Christmas hat that appeared on the VLC icon this year....

VideoLAN, the developers of the excellent VLC Media Player are working on a new free video editing package, VideoLAN Movie Creator.

I shall be watching this closely to see how it goes. Cool huh?

I just had to respond to a windows user who is temporarily using Ubuntu (Karmic) until they can get Windows back. They were concerned about the lack of Antivirus software. Apart from my hopeless grammar what do you think? Am I right? How would you have responded? Here is my response:

This year I ran a trial at a primary school in Lismore where all the year Year 5 and 6 students had a HP 2140 Netbook running Ubuntu. The trial has been a huge hit and will be continued next year. All computers in the school are now running Ubuntu KK. I have been asked to role out the same system at SFX Woolgoolga next year. Please let me know if you would like to know more about the pilot program.