06 May 2006 - Your Favorite FOSS
Topics
Your Favorite FOSS
Attendance
9
Presentation Resources
Compiz/XGL
Find out what is new http://compiz.blogspot.com/
The Compiz forum http://compiz.net/
Firefox Extensions
Where to get them https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/extensions/
VideoDownloader
"Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion... and other 60+ video sites !
And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) ! Directly !"
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
Fasterfox
"Fasterfox allows you to tweak many network and rendering settings such as simultaneous connections,
pipelining, cache, DNS cache, and initial paint delay."
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1269/
NoScript
"Extra protection for your Firefox: NoScript allows JavaScript, Java (and other plugins) only for
trusted domains of your choice (e.g. your home-banking web site). This whitelist based pre-emptive
blocking approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with
no loss of functionality... Experts will agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript ;-)"
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/722/
Adblock
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/10/
Adblock Filterset.G Updater
"This is a companion extension to Adblock and should be used in conjunction with it. This extension
automatically downloads the latest version of Filterset.G every 4-7 days. Filterset.G is an
excellent set of filters maintained by G for Adblock that blocks most ads on the internet. In
addition, this extension allows you to define your own set of filters that you can add along with
Filterset.G during an update."
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/
SlimSearch
"Select any text in your browser, then right-click to search it on the Web. You can do normal
searches, dictionary searches, address searches, Froogle, etc."
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2440/
Slax
During the meeting a new version of Slax was released"New features in the latest SLAX version include:
- added KDE 3.5.2, added koffice 1.5.0
- added FUSE and SSHFS filesystems, this will probably replace webconfig in the future
(or should we go for CODA filesystem?)
- autoexec boot argument now replaces "~" by space, this is useful if you need to execute command
with parameters (for example boot with autoexec=myprogram~paramA~paramB~>/dev/null)
- added make_disk.bat to CD, a script to create USB bootable disk in windows
- upgraded many libraries from Slackware current
- fixed manual IP configuration
- added iocharset= boot option, to mount WIN fs with your encoding
- and many more"
Slax home page http://slax.linux-live.org/
Home of slackware packages http://www.linuxpackages.net/
Mind Maping
Linux distribution mind map http://linuxhelp.blogspot.com/2006/04/mind-map-of-linux-distributions.html
Kdissert http://www.freehackers.org/~tnagy/kdissert/
FreeMind http://freemind.sourceforge.net
Bash
alt+. (dot) puts in the argument of the previous command at the cursorex.
user@ub64dapper:~$ ls -ld D*
drwxr-xr-x 6 user user 1136 2006-05-07 10:13 Desktop
drwxr-xr-x 25 user user 2920 2006-04-17 04:16 Documents
user@ub64dapper:~$ rm -fr [alt+.] ---> rm -fr D*
Mplayer
Dumping/Ripping streams mplayer -dumpstream "<url>" -dumpfile <file></file></url>
Other Apps
Yakuake http://yakuake.uv.ro/Adesklets http://netdragon.sourceforge.net
SuperKaramba http://adesklets.sourceforge.net/
Torsmo - according to the gentoo-wiki "Torsmo is unmaintained, and it's recommended
that you use Conky instead, it's based on torsmo but has a lot more features."
http://torsmo.sourceforge.net/
Conky http://conky.sourceforge.net/
KBFX http://www.linuxlots.com/~siraj/kde/plugin/home/
Meeting Notes
It was a beautiful, sunny day out. So, it is not entirely surprising that only 9 of us gathered in room 200 for the beginner-level TALUG meeting. Nevertheless, I must say it was a very comfortable and enjoyable afternoon.
There were a total of 4 people who took the front of the room to share something interesting with the rest of us. The range of subjects was great! We had a new face, Housson, present on some cool Firefox extensions (VideoDownloader, FasterFox, User Agent Switcher, NoScript, SlimSearch), htop, mplayer's -dumpstream feature, the latest GNOME (2.14.1) and I forget what all else.
Abdul (QoD) demonstrated the latest Xgl/Compiz eye candy. Bob Eiser gave a basic intro to the Slax distribution... It boots as a live CD to a command-line environment where you can quickly auto-configure X.org and launch into a KDE session. By merely downloading and installing the slapt-get package from linuxpackages.net, you can then proceed to install any application you want that isn't already included (like Firefox).
Abdul then took us on a tour of the Mindmap of Linux Distributions (Ver 2). Then I presented on mindmapping software in general with kdissert as my example. FreeMind is a popular Java-based mindmapper. I also quickly shared with everyone a neat little command-line trick in Bash that I recently learned... Basically, Alt-. is like hitting the up arrow, but it only cycles back through the *arguments* of your command history. My example is that you first confirm the accuracy of a globbing expression (like *foo*) or a long argument list with the 'ls' command (or something else innoccuous). Then, type 'rm' <space> and hit Alt-. to retrieve that carefully checked argument from the history.
The last mini-presentation was from Josh Locklear, who we are losing as he just graduated and is moving back to Columbus. Josh showed us Torsmo, a *really* light-weight resource monitor. Bye, Josh! We'll miss you at the meetings, but we're glad you're staying subscribed to the list...
We started a little late (as usual), but we actually went over on time before I knew it! I really enjoyed the meeting and I hope we do something like it again. It's great to see what everyone is discovering and learning with Free and Open Source Software! Hope to see you at the next one.
Jason
