Minutes of the meeting of MDLUG on Saturday, 10, oh! err 17, March 2007
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Check that date on the web page.  
Some people showed up for the meeting on the usual second Sat (the 15th).
But, as announced, the meeting took place on the third Saturday (the 17th).
It seems Mat had a conflict. When the guy with the keys has a conflict we all do.

We started off with a brief discussion of the new wireless antennas.
I put a pair of 7dbi on our ol' trusty Linksys.  
Dr. Bob demonstrated the antenna's directional strength difference by moving
the antenna around a bit.  

A small exchange with a few folks about where to find electronics gear resulted in
a recommendation of MouserElectonics.com.  Someone also said locally the Electronic Connection in Westland Ford and Newburg is worth looking into.  They are closed on Sunday and Wednesday.

As always several topics were being thrown back and forth.  

Carl was not at the meeting so the Gimp presentation was not possible since 
Carl is the one who brings the projector.

A longish topic was things we could do for newbies.  Topics ranged widely.
Backhack CD new.
Distro sampler
GRUB - what it is . . .
Hardrive partitoning
First Bash script
Ethercap directory IP addresses?
Directory structure suggestions for newbies
Bootable OS on USB


Other tools for not-so-newbies mentioned as a side discussion 
concerning seeingwhat's on your network:
etherape
nmap nmapfe find samba
wipeshark
ettercap  switch arp

Solaris version desktop CDE
KDE use KDETOOLS to configure

Pat said it costs $89 a day for Penguicon party room.
A suggestion was made to have a virtual party room
So, Pat put togeather a sign-up sheet for people who
want to get a t-shirt that says MDLUG Virtual Party Room.
Several people signed up.

Mary did an informal demo of Metisse (Mandhiva?)that rotated the desktop, 
allowed the cutting of a foreground screen  so that you operate WITHIN the 
area cut out on a lower level screen.

A mention was made that the flash drive may have a hard limit on the number 
of writes. 1 million hits.  VS 10,000 on NAND NOR.

Listed other web browsers and the ability to lie about being IE.

MAC wireless cards were brought up by a MAC owner.

Ray wrote a script to list a Dir in a path up on the board:
#!/bin/bash # lspath - shows all drives in path
 for i in $( echo $PATH | sed s/:/' '/g )
 do echo $i
 done

VNC like a remotedesktop
Gram Dobbs - electrical engineer

COMPUSA 30% off (closing) CPU MB $149 ($89 Microcenter) so 
not such a good deal.