peter's blog

Hi folks!

I had some spare time and I could finally work on the meeting pages. I ripped out the old "book" and created a new page from scratch that is using a Google calendar. Here you will find all the meetings that we schedule and I am working on getting the reminders piped correctly into the mailing list. This is also a first step to have our own RSVP system. I'll keep you posted.

Ted Ts'o reports that in an Ext4 file system can be corrupted under the following circumstances:

- the journal starts at block zero
- mount and umount the file system two times in a row very quickly

In worst case the meta data can be corrupted which can of course lead to the loss of data on that file system.

This problem might also occur in the kernel 3.5.x series because this code.

Today we had a great meeting of the CharLUG with a lot of interesting discussions It seems that over the last meetings some topics always came up.

First of all virtualization. This seems to be the hot topic for everybody. Folks like to test and play around with OS's in a VM and it opens up opportunities to try things that otherwise were really hard to do. I didn't take a real poll but it seems that most people favor VirtualBox on the desktop, but VMware is still very popular.

The time and day for the Snack & Hack changed. The new time is the first Thursday of the month at 6:30. Please check our meeting page for updates.

Our last meeting was a huge success. We had a lot of people showing up and good talks about Linux and Open Source. Lets keep the spirit and lets get together on April 7, 2012 for the next meeting!

On another note, we had a visit from a team of the South East Linux Fest. Here is some more detail about it:

SouthEast | LinuxFest
Linux in the GNU/South

At our last meeting we decided to establish a regular meeting schedule. For the time being we want to meet every four weeks starting Saturday, March 10th at 1:00pm.

When: Saturday, March 10, 2012, 1:00 PM
Where: Bellacino's Pizza & Grinders
7800 Stevens Mill Rd # Q
Matthews, NC
Repeat: Every 4 weeks

And here is some more detail:

We all are into Linux. We hang out. Chaos ensues.

It's getting closer. On Saturday, 10:00am our installfest will start at the Hackspace. Everybody is welcome to bring their machine and we will be happy to help and guide you through the installation and setup of Linux.

But the installfest has now an additional focus.

The CharLUG is currently preparing for an installfest.

What is an installfest?
Wikipedia has a nice definition:
An Installfest (a portmanteau of installation and festival) is an event, generally sponsored by a local Linux User Group, university or LAN party, at which people get together to do mass installations of computer operating systems or software, most often Linux and other open source software.

When: December 7, 2010 6:00pm
Where: Panera Bread - South Park
Meetup link: here

Seeing the success of the University City mini meets I decided to schedule one for South Charlotte.

To accommodate most people I am putting it at 6-10pm. I will be there for the whole duration but I expect people to come and go at various times. Same style as the University City mini meet, no formal topics, just tech talk and coffee.

If you are using Pidgin and MSN then most likely you saw a lot of "omega.contacts.msn.com" errors today. Luckily there is an easy fix for this issue.

1. Get the latest certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com. You can do this by going to https://omega.contacts.msn.com in your favorite browser and download the certificate for the site (click on the certificate icon and choose save to file). Or you can simply use the attached file.