Kuching Open Source Community??

Yeah, for those who are interested in open source stuff and staying in Sarawak, mainly Kuching, you can join us in Kuching Open Source Community (KuchingOSC) and do visit our website and forum.

Meet Up for December 2006

Since the end of 2005, the LUG seems to be dead but now the founder is back to Kuching and would like to have a meet up. The meet up will be on 14 December 2006, 8pm at Coffee Bean (Sarawak Plaza).

If you would like to join the meet up, please drop by to the location and look for some people with IT gadgets (laptop, etc) or Linux-related items (mags, etc).

About cron and the annoying "/bin/bash: root: command not found" error

Recently I was plagued by a series of emails generated by cron, sent to my root user account, claiming it can't find the command "root" in my crontab. After searching high and low on Google, I finally came across a posting which gave me a clue.

See, the system wide crontab (located at /etc/crontab) is the only crontab which specifies the user right running a particlar task. eg.

#tries to annoy me at 2:30am everyday
30 2 * * * root /root/annoy_me

This crontab entry specifies the annoy_me task to be run at 2:30am everyday by user root. Now, usually you'll use the command crontab -e to edit your own tasks. But if you happen to edit the /etc/crontab file manually, DO NOT run the command crontab /etc/crontab!! This will cause cron to take /etc/crontab as a user crontab and thus expecting field 6 (the field straight after the first 5 time specification fields) to be the command to execute.

So boys and gals, if that happens:

1. backup your system wide crontab file (/etc/crontab)
2. run crontab -r as root, to flush all the cron jobs
3. check if the system wide crontab is still in good health, if it is leave it be
4. restore the system wide crontab file if necessary
5. cron will read and execute the system wide cron tasks accordingly next time it wakes up

This is my understanding as far as explaining what happened to my FC4 cron installation. Comments and corrections welcome.

Cheers
Hong

Meet Up for December 2005

Hi, it's so sad because this meet up is not a success. This maybe due to no activities (no demo) and raining on the day. On the day, 9th December 2005 (Friday) only two of us (Boon Liang and Donald) showed up and "chit chat" on the LUG for a while before leaving.

During the "chit chat"ing, we does discussed on the future of the LUG and we agreed that the LUG may not survived if there is no activity and involvement of the members. So, if any of our members have any idea or suggestion, please do let us know by posting in the mailing list or to this blog page.

Hopefully, our beloved LUG will keep on survived...

First Look at MIMOS GNU/Linux Live CD (Beta Release)

I was a little surprise when I revisited the Asia Open Source Center's mirror site (http://mymirror.asiaosc.org) recently where at the bottom of the page there was a link to the MIMOS GNU/Linux Live CD (Beta Release).

Note: I am not a writer and this is my first ever review. So, please do excuse me if my language or write up is not good. :)


MIMOS GNU/Linux is a new Linux distribution (distro) developed by MIMOS Open Source Group (http://opensource.mimos.my) and is aimed to produce fully localized (Bahasa Malaysia) version of Linux together with the applications such as OpenOffice.org and KDE. Currently, this distro is in its beta release (version 0.9) and only available as Live CD that can be downloaded from http://mymirror.asiaosc.org/LiveCD/. This beta release is based on Knoppix 3.8 with Kernel 2.6.11, KDE 3.3.3 and OpenOffice.org with BM spell checker.


Trying out the Live CD

After downloading the ISO file and burned it into a blank CD, I restart my computer and boot into the live CD. The boot up sequence was similar to Knoppix with a slight changes by replacing the boot option screen and splash screen with MIMOS own screens. The live CD was successfully loaded on my old Pentium Celeron 600Mhz PC with 640MB of RAM. When the KDE started, I was greeted with the sound "initiating startup sequence" and that indicate that my built-in sound card was detected and configured properly.


Once loaded into KDE, I started the OpenOffice's Writer (version 1.1.3) to test out the BM spell checker, as mentioned in the website. The spell checker is working properly and able to detect my mistype BM words. Then I went on to try out the Mozilla Firefox (version 1.0.2) and the start-up page was showing the four (4) community projects by MIMOS, namely Titian Digital, AgriBazaar, MyGfl and Machine Language Translator. The only application that is quite up to date is Adobe Reader for Linux version 7.


I also try to install the system into my hard disk, which can be launched by double-cliking at the "Install MIMOS/GNU Linux" icon on the desktop. At first I just choose the default settings and configurations (except for destination as I would like to override my existing Linux partitions but keep my Windows partitions - dual boot) and I manage to complete the installation process. I then shutdown my computer and once again I was notified with the sound "initiating shutdown sequence" before the system is shutting down.


MIMOS GNU/Linux running from hard disk

On the next day, I try out the MIMOS GNU/Linux that I installed previously into my hard disk. But after switching on my computer, I was booted into my Windows XP and no sign of LILO even though the LILO installation was successful during the installation process. This mean that the installation was not fully successful. I boot into the live CD again and redo the installation process but choosing the "Debian: Debian-like system" option, and finally the system was installed properly with LILO as the boot manager.

Now I was running the MIMOS GNU/Linux system from my hard disk and continue to test the system. The first things that I notice when booted into the system is that there was no default wallpaper displayed on my desktop. So, I launched the KDE Control Center and make some modifications to the default settings by choosing wallpaper and other settings. I notice that the Theme Manager list is empty and I have no other choices besides using the default theme.


This is what I think about this distro

With this, I end up my write up on this new distro and here is what I think about this new distro: Generally, the MIMOS GNU/Linux Live CD is a good start for Malaysia to have their localized version of Linux and its applications. I hope that the full version will be released soon with more improvements and localized applications. With this localized distro, we hope that it will be beneficial to all Malaysian.

Another KuchingLUG logo

Here is another design for our KuchingLUG logo.

For this logo, I design it in black and white so that the logo can be used for t-shirt, printed materials, etc with minimal cost (no need for color printer, less color less cost). The logo is also simple where i use part of the Linux official logo (in a square box) plus additional of Kuching Linux User Group's wording to represent our LUG.

So, feel free to give comments or suggestions regarding this (or the previous) logo designs. Thank you.

Regards, Boon Liang.

MIMOS GNU/Linux Live CD (Beta)

Recently, MIMOS Open Source Group (http:///www.mimos.my) has released its first beta of Linux Live CD known as MIMOS GNU/Linux Live CD, which is based on Knoppix 3.8.

The main goal of this project is to produce a fully localized Bahasa Melayu (BM) Linux Live CD. For this beta release, the Live CD includes:
- Kernel 2.6.11
- KDE 3.3
- OpenOffice.org with BM Spell Checker
- Firefox start-up page is customized to highlight other MIMOS community projects such as Titian Digital, AgriBazaar, MyGfl and Machine Language Translation.

The future release will include:
- KDE 3.4(fully localized to BM)
- BM version of Firefox
- BM version of Thunderbird

For more information and download link, please visit http://mymirror.asiaosc.org/LiveCD/.

Linux lecturer job

Hi all

There's a lecturer job opening up at a local IT institute, lecturing on introductory Linux course:

1. Linux concepts
2. Installation
3. Package management
4. X, Windowing systems
5. Scripting (Bash, perl)
6. Editors (Ed, Vi, Emacs)
7. Mail handlers (Ex, etc)
8. Compilers and debuggers
etc, etc

For details please give me an email at hchyr@streamyx.com

Cheers
Chyr

T-shirt for KuchingLUG #2

Ok, here is another design that was proposed by Chyr last two months. Sorry that I take so long to put it up here as I was bz with my workload.

Everyone are encourage to give comments on both designs and if there is other proposal that you would like to post up, u can post it up to this blog or e-mail to me (email@boonliang.com) and I will put it up for u (in "t-shirt" format).

Meet up for November 2005

We had an interesting meet up on 11 Nov 2005.

4 of us turned up: Chyr (myself), Boon Liang, Iman and Winston. Winston is a good friend of mine but it was his first meet up in KuchingLUG.

We talked about MPlayer and how to use it to play almost any type of media file (AVI, MPEG, MP3, etc). It was also interesting to know that Boon Liang and Iman uses Totem Movie Player, as opposed to my favourite MPlayer.

Hopefully there will be more of you turning up next time. I'll think of another topic to talk about.

Chyr