- Roundtable - muug.ca

MUUG Meeting, May 10, 7:30pm -- The Xen Hypervisor
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 03 May '05

03 May '05

[Posted to man.unix.general and other news groups] ------ Forwarded Article <d585va$gb7$1(a)canopus.cc.umanitoba.ca> ------ From gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca (Gilbert E. Detillieux) The Manitoba UNIX User Group (MUUG) will be holding its next monthly meeting on Tuesday, May 10. The meeting topic for this month is as follows: The Xen Hypervisor You may have heard about Virtual Machine Managers (VMMs) such as VMware or Microsoft's Virtual PC, and now Xen. What are they? How do they work? How do they differ from each other? And more importantly, what can they do for you? Kevin McGregor will be shedding light on these topics at the May 10th meeting. The group holds its general meetings at 7:30pm on the second Tuesday of every month from September to June. (There are no meetings in July and August.) Meetings are open to the general public; you don't have to be a MUUG member to attend. ********************************************************************** Please note our meeting location: The IBM offices, at 400 Ellice Ave. (between Edmonton and Kennedy). When you arrive, you will have to sign in at the reception desk, and then wait for someone to take you (in groups) to the meeting room. Please try to arrive by about 7:15pm, so the meeting can start promptly at 7:30pm. Don't be late, or you may not get in. (But don't come too early either, since security may not be there to let you in before 7:15 or so.) Limited parking is available for free on the street, or in a lot across Ellice from IBM, for $1.00 for the evening. Indoor parking is also available nearby, at Portage Place, for $2.00 for the evening. ********************************************************************** For more information about MUUG, and its monthly meetings, check out their Web server: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ Also note that MUUG maintains two mailing lists, called "muug-announce" and "roundtable". If you're not already on these lists, we encourage you to subscribe now: http://www.muug.mb.ca/mailman/listinfo/ The "muug-announce" list is used for monthly meeting announcements (such as this one) as well as other important announcements of interest to MUUG members. The "rountable" list is meant to be a forum for follow-ups to topics discussed at the meetings, or for round-table-style discussion on other topics that come up between meetings. Of course, for this to be effective, we need to reach a certain critical mass. So, please subscribe, and stay involved! -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)muug.mb.ca> Manitoba UNIX User Group Web: http://www.muug.mb.ca/ P.O. Box 130, St-Boniface Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R2H 3B4 Fax: (204)474-7609 ------ End of Forwarded Article

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Envelope Printing under Linux
by John Lange 03 May '05

03 May '05

One of the things that still manages to frustrate me on a regular basis is printing under Linux. I have notice some dramatic improvements recently, especially with HP now releasing their own Linux drivers for all of their printers and KDE & CUPS focusing on bringing it all together. But I still run into problems from time to time. Today, I think I have run the same envelope through by 2 HP printers at least 40 times to no avail. I simply can not get an envelope to print. Printers I've tried are: HP Photosmart 7760 HP Deskjet 830C Tried printing from OpenOffice 1.1.4 and kGhostscript. In OpenOffice I did "Insert >> Envelope" and entered the information and it makes a nice envelope on screen. Great, now if I could only mail my monitor everything would be wonderful. On the other hand, when I print it the printer stops saying "Paper too small". If I put in a sheet of 8.5x11 it prints it fine and in the proper orientation. I have tried every conceivable combination of settings in OO and the printer settings themselves. Paper is set to DL, landscape/portrait everything I could think of but it always does the same thing. Finally I tried exporting it to a PDF and printing that but got the exact same results. No matter what I do it will not print the envelope. It seems the printers are expecting the paper to be full size which leads me to believe the settings are not being passed from the software to the printer... If there is some magic to this please let me know. P.S. I used to have an HP Laser 4MP which has Postscript built in and it was the only thing that I ever got to print an envelope under Linux. Regards, -- John Lange President OpenIT ltd. www.Open-IT.ca (204) 885 0872 VoIP, Web services, Linux Consulting, Server Co-Location

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Re: [RndTbl] tripod slider images?
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 19 Apr '05

19 Apr '05

According to Ian: > Hi all. > Really enjoyed your presentation on 3D images Gilbert! What good fun > that looks to be. Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it and are interested in trying this out... > If anyone owns one a tripod slider and wouldn't mind posting some > detailed pictures, I'd love to have a closer look at one. A Google search on the 3 words "tripod slide bar" will give you a lot of results... http://www.google.com/search?q=tripod+slide+bar Some of the pages (and photos) are of commercial products, and some are for "homebrew" contraptions. So, you have plenty of options, either way. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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tripod slider images?
by Ian 19 Apr '05

19 Apr '05

Hi all. Really enjoyed your presentation on 3D images Gilbert! What good fun that looks to be. If anyone owns one a tripod slider and wouldn't mind posting some detailed pictures, I'd love to have a closer look at one. Cheers! Ian.

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MTS DSL Speeds
by John Lange 18 Apr '05

18 Apr '05

I see MTS has 3 different DSL services: Light Speed DSL, DSL High Speed, Lightning Speed DSL. Surprisingly, the web site does not indicate what the speeds are (other than "fast", "faster", "fastest"). I'm curious what the theoretical upload speeds are for each level? If anyone is actually using these services, what is the "real" upload speeds you get? Thanks. John

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Toshiba Achieves Breakthrough in Flatbed 3-D Display
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 17 Apr '05

17 Apr '05

Rather timely announcement, after my presentation last Tuesday... http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/press/2005_04/pr1501.htm Not sure if they licenced the technology from one of the patent holders... If not, we might start to see some legal activity on that front. In any case, it will be interesting to see what sorts of products and applications emerge. -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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Re: [RndTbl] The early days of Unix
by gedetil＠cs.umanitoba.ca 17 Apr '05

17 Apr '05

According to Peter C.J. Graham: > 75 pre-dates both Gilbert and myself, I believe but there certainly > was a PDP 11/45 here in the late 70's. I'm not sure what whether the > original 11/45 was around in 75. Might just have been someone who was > interested but didn't have hardware yet. Gilbert, do you know if Doug > was active with Unix at that time? My earliest recollection, and earliest contact with the department of Computer Science, is from the spring of 1978, when I came for an open house. I saw the Norpak graphics system as well as some other demos, which I later learned made use of the PDP 11/45, behind the scenes, running UNIX Sixth Edition. By the time I started working (part-time) for the department, late in my first year of study, in 1980, the PDP 11/45 was still running UNIX 6ed. One of the first tasks that my brother and I undertook, when we were put in charge of administering that machine a year later (summer of 1981), was upgrading to UNIX 7ed, which had been released in 1979, and which had been purchased and was (sadly) sitting on the shelf for almost two years. I have no knowledge of specifics pre-1978, but I'm quite sure the PDP had been around for a few years already, so it's quite possible that UNIX 6th edition (released May 1975*) had been purchased for it, or in anticipation of using it at a later date. According to Bill Reid: > > John, > > > > Thanks for the URL. That list which includes U of M was a 1975 Unix mailing list > > not a list of Internet nodes. The U of M did not become an Internet node until > > 89-90. And one of my first tasks after going to work full-time for the department, in the fall of 1989, was to get our systems Internet-ready. > > Gilbert were you at the U of M in 75? I'm not _that_ old! ;) > > I think Computer Science ran Unix on a PDP in the early days. Yes, they did, but I'm not sure how far back the "early days" go in this case... * History of UNIX / Linux and other variants http://www.computerhope.com/history/unix.htm -- Gilbert E. Detillieux E-mail: <gedetil(a)cs.umanitoba.ca> Dept. of Computer Science Web: http://www.cs.umanitoba.ca/~gedetil/ University of Manitoba Phone: (204)474-8161 Winnipeg, MB, CANADA R3T 2N2 Fax: (204)474-7609

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The early days of Unix
by John Lange 17 Apr '05

17 Apr '05

There is a nice article on Growklaw which describes the very early days of Unix. Denice Richie, Ken Thompson, etc. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20050414215646742 One thing caught by eye; about 1/2 way through there is a listing of the original 20 or so nodes of the internet and guess who is there? The U of Manitoba! (along with 3 other Canadian universities). A fascinating read for anyone interested in the birth of the modern Internet and Unix. John Lange

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Backing up over the Internet
by Bill Reid 16 Apr '05

16 Apr '05

Rsync works great to back up directories over the Internet. For security I was interested in having the backup copy encrypted and rsync does not really work in this senario. I found two candidates for this: Box Backup http://www.fluffy.co.uk/boxbackup/ duplicity http://www.nongnu.org/duplicity/ I am giving Box Backup a try. Has anyone used either of the these systems? Are there other suggestions? Thanks, Bill

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Printing PDFs in Linux
by John Lange 15 Apr '05

15 Apr '05

We have a report server which generates PDF files. These reports are 8-1/2" x 14 (legal). Under windows, Acrobat reader will scale these to print on 8-1/2" x 11". As far as I can tell there is no way to do something similar in Linux. Does anyone have a suggestion on how this could be done? John

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