The March 15, 2007 PLUG meeting will feature Ryan showing how to build a GNU/Linux system from scratch.

Linux From Scratch (http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/) is a popular recipie for doing so.

The June 15, 2006 PLUG meeting will feature the Asterisk Gateway Interface The meeting is at 7:30, in room 2M70 (Manitoba building) at the University of Winnipeg.

I was trolling around OpenOffice Forums when I discovered a post about the structure of OpenOffice files. I was kind of amazed to discover a friendly file format lurking beneath the sxw.

While the linux on the desktop revolution is amassing troops and the code warriors are busy perfecting thier battle plan, administrators must still deal with protecting WIndows users who are being used as bullet catchers for the MicroSlave master. Doing administration with Windows in mind means protecting users from MicroSoft's inherently insecure OS.

The biggest source of risk to windows users starts at the mail server so integrating an anti-virus scanner into your mail system can save hours of grief to both users and admins. Here are the steps I went through to integrate f-prot, and mailscanner into the delivery subsystem.

It can be a long and winding road trying to build and install Garnome. That being said, it is still the coolest way I know to get the latest version of Gnome. If you want to join me on the journey read on...

One of the nicest features of X is its possibility to display applications which are running on another machine. This is my favorite feature of X so I decided i'd write a little "how-to" for those of you who might also want to set it up.

I remember when I first started with linux, even such simple things as changing a file permission or removing a directory were mysteries. Today I came across a site full of very small tutorials on doing small things with Linux, which could be of great help when you are stuck on some issue. Check it out at http://www.ee.usyd.edu.au/tutorials_online/linux.htm

Heartbeat is an open source project that implements a heartbeat protocol. That is, messages are sent at regular intervals between machines and if a message is not received from a particular machine then the the machine is assumed to have failed and some form of evasive action is taken. If a node fails then another node in the heartbeat cluster will start up an interface for that IP address. This method of fail-over is called IP Address Takeover.

While not quite the same as the GUI apps for design in Windows, many Open Source authoring/design tools listed here are more powerful than their proprietary counterparts. (You\'ll never see dynamic server-side image creation done with Photoshop the way Gimp\'s perl server scripting can) PLUG wrote our Constitution and ByLaws using all OSS tools to create our PDF.

ow that Linux has a handful of friendly desktops from which to choose, it\'s more and more likely that you\'ll be dual-booting between Windows and Linux. Or perhaps you\'ll simply do your work on several different machines. This stripped-down version of mobile computing can be a bit frustrating if you use Netscape Navigator, because your Netscape settings don\'t carry over from one client to the next. I solve this problem by running Netscape remotely on the server as an X client. I then use Linux or Windows as the X display server. But X11 is rather network-intensive. If you have a lot of users on your system, you may not want to take this tack. As an alternative, you can use the roaming feature that has been in Netscape since version 4.5. This allows you to change preferences, add and delete bookmarks, and make other changes on one client -- and have those changes reflected on the next client you use, even if it\'s on a different operating system. All the configuration files are kept at the server. You can use one of two different transfer mechanisms for the configuration files. You can use an LDAP server or a Web server to manage the files. I chose the Web server approach.