Vol. 23 number 7 September 2006 The newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group Calendar OPCUG General Meeting National Museum of Science and Technology 1867 St. Laurent Blvd. Second (*third) Wednesday of each month, 7:30pm *Sep 20 SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Oct 11 Nov 08 Dec 13 Jan 10 *Feb 21 Mar 14 Apr 11 May 09 Jun 13 BBQ Beginner SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. IT Pro SIG After the OPCUG General Meeting, at the Museum. PIG (or Wing?) SIG, after all the other SIGs, at 10 p.m. Chances "R", 1365 Woodroffe (at Baseline), College Square Beer BOF (Wing SIG East, after all the SIGs, at 10 p.m. Liam Maguire's, St. Laurent at Innes Rd. (formerly Hooters) Please note that unless otherwise noted, SIGs meet at 9:00 p.m. (immediately following the OPCUG General Meeting). ____________________________ Coming Up... September 20th, 2006, THIRD Wednesday SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 (http://www.novell.com/linux) Novell describes SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 as "the Platform for the Open Enterprise". Their design goal for SUSE Linux Enterprise was to make it the best-engineered, lowest-cost and most interoperable platform for enterprise computing. As a result, SUSE Linux Enterprise is offered as a complete open source solution, from the desktop to the data center, for the mission-critical applications that drive a business. This presentation will show many of the features and functionality other vendors have been promising in their next generation products, available today for a small fraction of the cost. A comparison will be offered between the open-source, community-based product, OpenSUSE and Novell's subscription-based, enterprise products SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. Lothar Wegner is a Technology Solutions Architect for Novell Canada based in Ottawa. He helps customers in both Ottawa and Atlantic Canada understand Novell solutions and how to integrate them into their environment. He has been working in the local IT community for over 16 years, the last 8 with Novell. ____________________________ September Raffle At the September meeting, thanks to the generosity of McAfee Canada, we have 5, yes 5 copies of McAfee VirusScan 2006 for the raffle. One of the world's most popular anti-virus programs could be busy protecting your computer! You have five times the chances you normally have in the OPCUG raffles! And tickets are still only $1 for one, $2 for three, or $5 for ten. ____________________________ Winner of Newsletter Contest The winner of the 2005/2006 Contest for Best Newsletter Article is Lionel Wagner with his article "Are you ready for Linux? Linux is ready for you.", which appeared in last December's Ottawa PC News. Lionel won a Microsoft Notebook optical mouse, the game Age of Empires III, and a copy of the book Firefox Hacks. Congratulations, Lionel! ____________________________ Newsletter Help It seems that my plea for help last April (Your newsletter needs YOU!) wasn't in vain. I would like to thank Sara Gelfand for stepping forward and offering to help with the monthly newsletters. A big challenge in lean times is finding material to fill several pages of this newsletter month after month. The Contest for Best Newsletter Article (below) was started last year to generate more articles. When this is not enough, Sara can help me find content to reprint or help in another capacity. Sara participated in last year's contest with her book review of Windows XP Personal Trainer. Perhaps I can convince her to once again pick up the pen. :-) Brigitte Lord Editor, Ottawa PC News ____________________________ Contest for Best Newsletter Article - 2006/2007 In an effort to generate more content for our popular Ottawa PC News, the Board of Directors (BOD) has decided to bring back the contest for best article written by an OPCUG member. The contest will launch in September 2006 and run until June 2007. Members of the BOD cannot participate. Computer related topics are preferable, but not mandatory. Articles can be submitted from June 1, 2006 to April 22, 2007. These will be published in the Ottawa PC News between September 2006 and May 2007 (inclusive). Articles will be published in the order they are received. If a large number of articles is received, some may not be published due to space restrictions as we approach the April deadline. And in that case, in order to have as many contestants as possible, an article submitted by a new participant will be published over one submitted by a returning participant. Participants will be offered a choice of having unused articles published after the contest period or having them destroyed. Only those articles published during the contest period will be eligible for the contest. Articles from members not interested in participating in the contest will also be accepted (these members should mention that they are not interested in participating). All articles must be original and written by the participant. There is no word limit. Lengthy articles will be made available online from the OPCUG website and two or three pages will be published in the newsletter. If an article can be broken into two parts of two or three pages each, then it may be published in two subsequent monthly issues, space permitting. Only members of the OPCUG may participate (BOD members are excluded). The BOD reserves the right to refuse an article because of improper or questionable content and the article will be returned to the author for revision or retraction. Individual participants may submit more than one article over the contest period. Voting will take place online at the OPCUG website. Instructions will follow once the system is in place and voting time approaches (May-June). The winner will be presented with a prize at the June meeting of the OPCUG (prize to be determined). Send submissions to brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca between June 1, 2006 and April 22, 2007. Articles may be written in any basic text editor, MS Word, or Corel WordPerfect. Good luck and good writing! Brigitte Lord Editor, Ottawa PC News ____________________________ Product Review CCleaner by Jocelyn Doire I always try to keep my computer as clean as possible to avoid many problems such as filling up my hard drive too quickly, but it takes time and it's not always easy to know what is good and what is not. Obviously, one can delete the Recycle Bin and the Temporary Internet Files without trouble, but there are lots of files I'm not sure about, and there are those that I know exist but not where they are. So when I heard at the IT Pro SIG that CCleaner was a nice cleanup program that was quite reliable and free, I was happy to give it a try. As a precaution I did a full image of my hard disk and took the opportunity to fully update my Windows. The main window of CCleaner is divided in 3 main parts; the left column has 4 buttons to select the type of cleanup and options, the middle one lets you select in detail what to delete, and the one at the right shows what will be deleted if you click on the "Analyse" button, and what was deleted if you click on the "Run Cleaner". Using the program is quite simple. For example, to delete all the files in the Internet Explorer cache, unselect all the choices (click on the 4 check boxes in the first column), select "Temporary Internet Files", and then click on the "Run Cleaner" button. The real advantage of CCleaner starts when you select more choices. For example, select all the files related to Internet Explorer, or if you are really ambitious, you can even select all the choices and then simply watch the program do all the work for you. Selecting everything is simple but it might do more than what you want. For example, selecting "Recently Typed URLs" means that you will have to retype in full all the internet addresses again, instead of typing just a few characters. CCleaner gives a warning with some of the choices; read the text to decide if you want it or not. Since I installed Windows over 3 years ago I expected to have a lot of crap on my machine, so I went ahead and selected everything and clicked on "Analyse" and sure enough I got a very long list. I tried to review it but I soon realised that it was way too much, and simply pressed the "Run Cleaner" button. The result was that it deleted over 300MB of data on my hard drive, which I thought was rather impressive given that I had recently done a cleanup using the standard Windows's tools. CCleaner is not limited to Windows programs; it also has a fairly extensive list of applications such as Firefox, Opera, OpenOffice, Macromedia, WinZip and many more under the "Applications" tabs (a list that is updated automatically). Once again, you can select what you want and delete it in a single step. I don't particularly like to have a lot of cookies(1) stored on my machine by the various sites I visit, but deleting them all is a real pain because some are quite useful. For this reason CCleaner has added the option to selects which cookies you want to keep; all you need to do is select the cookies from the "Cookies to Delete" panel and to move them to the "Cookies to Keep" using the arrows in the middle, and when you run the cleaner, CCleaner will automatically exclude those cookies from destruction. Another area where a lot of baggage can accumulate is the registry, but it is something best left alone normally, as stated clearly in so many places. Despite the warnings, I was very much interested in cleaning it because, according to many ads I read, I could get a faster Windows and a reduction in glitches. So I clicked on "Scan for Issues" and once again the list I got was way too extensive to review in detail, with over 500 issues. Clicking on "Fix Selected Issues..." gave me the option to backup the registry, a real nice touch, and then it opened a dialog explaining each problem, what could have caused it, offered a solution and then offered the option to accept each individual change or all of them. After a few weeks of using my computer I still have not seen any negative consequences of accepting all the deletions. CCleaner also provides two tools to further clean your hard drive; the first one offers to uninstall any program you have, a function very similar to the one included with Windows but with some extra functionality, and a second tool that can remove programs from the various startup sources. A little negative note about CCleaner is that it does not install a help file on your machine; instead it uses an online version, which can be inconvenient for people having a slow connection, though the site includes many source of information including a FAQ and a forum. The program also provides a convenient link to update the program at the bottom of all the screens. After deleting everything I could using CCleaner, I went through Chris Taylor's June 2006 article "At the Beginners' SIG" http://opcug.ca/public/Articles/0606.pdf to see if I could find further things to delete, and I did. For example, I found out that I could remove the Windows patch uninstall folders, plus there were many other good suggestions that still make that article very useful. CCleaner is a freeware, and as far as I can tell, is free of any malware. The site has many Google ads, which probably helps to pay for the bandwidth, and if you like the program you are invited to make a donation at CCleaner's web site: http://www.ccleaner.com/ Now that I have freed several hundreds of MB on my drive I can go back to my normal activities and add some more stuff. :-) (1) Cookies are little files stored on your hard drive that contain bits of info used by the internet sites you visit, to keep track of what you do at the their site, to store passwords and/or preferences, and many more things, potentially invading some of your privacy. ____________________________ Product Review FolderSync - File Comparison and Directory Synchronization by Alan German When I found the freeware package FolderSync listed on PC World's "101 Freebies" web page (http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,124883,00.asp) , I couldn't resist giving it a try. I'm always looking for a quick and easy way to make backups of projects in progress and usually this means copying new and updated files from my working directory to a USB memory key. And, that's precisely what FolderSync is designed to do. To conduct a comparison, you need to specify the directories with both the "new" and the "old" versions of the files. Pressing the "Compare Files" button then creates a two- column list of the files in the two directories. An equality sign is displayed between each set of two files that are identical. Any differences between files are noted with a large check mark to the left of the file name listings, and an arrow indicating a newer version of a file that can be copied so as to replace the older version. A second button allows you to specify that the folders should be synchronized. No immediate action is taken. Rather, a pop-up dialogue box offers various file transfer options. In particular, you can specify that files should be copied from the directory containing the new versions to the directory with the old versions or, conversely, that files should be copied from the old to the new version. In addition, there is an option to delete files from the old version that don't exist in the new version. This all sounds very complicated but, in practice, both the check marks and the file listings are colour coded as either blue or red, depending on which directory contains the newer version, and the arrows point in the appropriate directions to copy the new version over the old. Furthermore, file selection buttons on the menu bar allow the display to be filtered in several ways. One useful option to simplify a large directory listing is to include only those files that are different between the two directories. Additional program options are to include sub-directories in the folder comparisons, and to compare files by either time/date stamp or by binary content. The program allows all the specified options to be saved to a "profile" that can be retrieved for future use, this being intended to automate regularly performed directory synchronizations. An unusual option is the ability to create a "patch" file that contains only the differences in content between two sets of files. The program's author suggests that this technique can be used to quickly update a large file (or a set of files) that is distributed by E-mail, since it is only necessary to send the changes, using the patch, rather than transmitting the complete new version of the file. Bottom Line FolderSync Build 0.2.0.44 Gerhard Kalab (Freeware) http://www.kalab.com/freeware/ ____________________________ Contest for Best Newsletter Article - 2006/2007 Printing from the Web by Micheline Johnson Source your document Most web documents these days are in HTML or PDF format. If you print an HTML document from your browser, it prints the source URL at the top or bottom, but usually truncates it, and annoyingly repeats the URL as a footnote on every page. If you print a PDF document from a browser, it usually does not print the source URL. More and more articles these days are published on the web in PDF format. It is important to have the source URL on the first page of your printout, so that later you can find out where the article came from. Extracting the article from the Ads Many commercial sites are more in the business of publishing advertisements, with multi-part articles (a few paragraphs per part) buried amongst all the ads. A few more considerate sites offer a print friendly version, with all the parts included on one page, without the ads. The standard way to print articles from such sites without a print-friendly version, was to select (highlight) the article part of each web page, and print the selected part. You still end up with typically 5-10 pages (parts) of print. The font size on the web page is usually chosen to suit the viewer, and not the print output, resulting in a print font usually far too large. If there are tables on the web page with defined widths, which there usually where there are ads in adjacent columns, then often the text column width exceeds the width of your printed page. Printing PDF web pages PDF files have the advantage that they contain no advertisements, and they are formatted and have font sizes, to suit the printed page. They usually print beautifully, but have no source URL on the printout. Unfortunately, you cannot edit a PDF document (yet) to insert the source URL before printing it. I used to add the source URL by hand at the top of the first page. Lately, I have discovered how easy it is to paste this URL into a WordPad document, adjust the WordPad Page-Setup top margin to suit the space available at the top of the PDF first page printout, and print this WordPad document onto the top of the first printed page of the PDF. HTML pages with long URLs The same technique can be used for simple single page HTML pages that have URLs so long that they get truncated when printed by most browsers, IE included. Print the page with your browser, but also copy the page address (URL) into WordPad, adjust the font size so that the URL fits onto one line (or if it is exceptionally long, onto two lines), and print this WordPad document onto the top of the already printed HTML page. Printing HTML web pages Printing an article from a commercial web page is much harder. In order to conserve the amount of printed paper, I have long since taken to transferring the article from the web page to a word-processor, removing the fixed width tables, adjusting the font size to get more words per page, combining all the parts into a single part, and adding the source URL at the top of the article, before printing it out. The copy-and-paste feature in Windows is amazingly powerful. If you select the text and images of interest from the web page, then Ctrl+C will copy not just the text, but all the underlying HTML, including the tables and pictures. This is often more than you really want. When you paste (Ctrl+V), a small icon at the end of the paste is very useful. It allows the paste to be formatted as in the original web document (font size etc), or as in the destination document. The latter takes care of your preferred font size, but it removes all the paragraph spacing. Rather than re-insert the para spacing, I usually find it faster to paste as per the source document, and then modify the font size of the whole document. This retains the original para formatting. Copy-and-paste from a web page does not actually copy from the page stored in your computer, but instead downloads a new copy from the source site. This can be slow. A faster method is often to use Paste Special, and select one of the options offered, such as * Unformatted text * Formatted text (RTF) * Unformatted Unicode text etc. This copies directly from your computer. Copy-and-paste works well from HTML to MS Word, after all Internet Explorer and Word were designed to work together. Corel WordPerfect does not work as well. Corel are aware that they have a problem with pasting tables and images. Removing the text from the hidden tables can be tricky, especially when it is not obvious that tables are present. The first clue is that your text does not flow to the edge of the page. The second clue is that when you place the mouse over the text-in-a-table, a "move" square (square with 4 arrows) appears at the top left hand corner of the table, and a tiny (expand/contract) square appears at the bottom right hand corner of the table. The first thing to do is to right-click either of these squares, select borders and shading, and select a border type that you can see. Now you can remove the superfluous columns and rows, and copy the text and images you want to a part of your document outside the table, before deleting the entire table. Postscript: Extracting articles, or parts of articles, from HTML web pages, including automatic attribution (source address), is now made a lot easier with Google Notebook, see http://www.google.com/googlenotebook/overview.html. ____________________________ Book Review Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun by Alan German The book 'Just for Fun - The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary', by Linus Torvalds and David Diamond, provides a biography of the individual who created Linux and then spearheaded its further development. While there are nominally two authors, most of the book is structured as having been written by Torvalds himself as a first-person account, with supplementary notes on the project's progress, and details from meetings with Torvalds' friends and relatives, by Diamond. The text suffers slightly from the inclusion of some rather adolescent verbiage, seemingly there solely for its shock-value, and to enhance the image of the computer nerd. In contrast, there are many passages where Torvalds eloquently expresses his strong beliefs in the virtues of the open-source movement to develop high-quality products, while in no way wanting to limit the uses of such technology, and acknowledging the creation of wealth through its commercial application. Perhaps the most interesting portion of the book is the description of the "Birth of an Operating System", i.e. the development of Linux. Torvalds indicates that he progressed from programming a Commodore VIC-20 in 1981, around the age of eleven, through a Sinclair QL (Timex computers in North America), to a 386 PC-clone in 1991. As a student at the University of Helsinki in 1990, Torvalds had used a version of Unix on the university's VAX computer, and subsequently wanted to run Minix, a Unix variant, on his brand-new PC. However, he wasn't satisfied with a number of aspects of Minix and its applications, especially the terminal emulator which he used to connect to the university's computer. So, he sat down to write his own terminal emulator in assembler. Then, in order to be able to transfer files, he needed to write a disk driver. Having added this and other functions to his program, it became clear to Torvalds that he had the makings of a full-blown operating system, albeit at a somewhat elementary level. To move ahead, he needed to write his code to comply with the POSIX standards used for Unix function calls. His E-mail message of July, 1991 on the Minix discussion group, asking for information on these standards, raised the initial interest in his work to develop a new operating system. By August he had a working shell program and a number of the system calls written, and put out a call for features of Minix that other users did and did not like so that he could make his operating system more user-desirable. Little feedback was forthcoming but a number of individuals interested in testing the software were identified. So, when Version 0.01 of the new operating system was ready on September 17, 1991, it was posted to an FTP site. At that time the software was still very rudimentary and needed specialized knowledge to get it working. Torvalds' favourite comment from one of the few to initially try the package was from the individual who indicated that "...he really liked my operating system... Then, he explained that it had just eaten his hard disk..." Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device drivers? - Announcement of Linux Version 0.02 Updated versions with new features (and bug fixes!) came thick and fast in late 1991, including the first implementation of a user-requested feature - virtual memory through paging to disk - by the end of December. According to Torvalds this feature was the breakthrough that made Linux take off. People started switching from Minix to Linux, and the General Public Licence (GPL) was adopted, opening the way for the multi-developer model that became the path to rapid software development. The other major milestone discussed in the book is the porting of X-Windows to Linux and the consequent development of external networking. An interesting note is that, by March 1992, because of these latter developments, Torvalds felt that the operating system was 95% complete and, rather than releasing Version 0.13 as planned, he jumped to Version 0.95. However, this turned out to be premature optimism, as it took a further two years to reach Version 1.0. If you want to read more of the story, get hold of the book. You will find that the young Torvalds was the stereotypical geek, often not moving from in front of the computer screen for days, and only going out to weekly computer users' group meetings (!) But, who can't admire a guy who likes physics - and mathematics - and the challenges of computer programming? You will also read about the flame war with the author of Minix, how Internet users took up a collection to help pay for Torvalds' first PC, how he found his wife by E-mail, his thoughts on root beer, his impressions from meetings with Steve Job (Apple) and Bill Joy (Sun), how he came to work for Transmeta Corporation (and a little of what they do!), that Red Hat gave him some stock options prior to the tech- bubble, and that he now drives a BMW Z3. All this, and you can also find out what bash and grub actually stand for - and that Linux could have been named Freax! Bottom Line Just for Fun - The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary Linus Torvalds and David Diamond HarperCollins; 2001 ISBN 0-06-662072-4 (Ottawa Public Library Call No. 005.1092 TOR) ____________________________ OTTAWA PC NEWS Ottawa PC News is the newsletter of the Ottawa PC Users' Group (OPCUG), and is published monthly except in July and August. The opinions expressed in this newsletter may not necessarily represent the views of the club or its members. Member participation is encouraged! If you would like to contribute an article to Ottawa PC News, please submit it to the newsletter editor (contact info below). Deadline for submissions is three Saturdays before the General Meeting. Group meetings OPCUG normally meets on the second Wednesday in the month, except in July and August, at the National Museum of Science and Technology, 1867 St. Laurent Blvd, Ottawa. Meetings are 7:30-9:00 p.m. and Special Interest Groups go until 10 p.m. Fees: OPCUG annual membership: $25 per year. Mailing address: 3 Thatcher St., Nepean, Ontario, K2G 1S6 Web address: http://opcug.ca/ Bulletin Board - PUB II (BBS): http://opcug.ca/default.htm President and System Administrator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 613 727-5453 Meeting Coordinator: Bob Gowan, bob.gowan@@opcug.ca Treasurer: Alan German, alan.german@@opcug.ca Secretary: (Mr.) Jocelyn Doire, jocelyn.doire@@opcug.ca Membership Chairman: Mark Cayer, Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca, 613 823-0354 Newsletter: Brigitte Lord, brigitte.lord@@opcug.ca Email: (Mr.)Jocelyn Doire, Jocelyn.Doire@@opcug.ca Public Relations: Morris Turpin, PR@@opcug.ca, 613 729-6955 Facilities: Bob Walker, 613 489-2084 Webmaster: Brigitte Lord, opcug-webmaster@@opcug.ca Privacy Director: Wayne Houston, privacy@@opcug.ca Director without portfolio Ted May, tamay@@rogers.com Beginners' SIG Coordinator: Chris Taylor, chris.taylor@@opcug.ca, 613 727-5453 IT Pro SIG: Bob Thomas, ITProSIG@@opcug.ca Note: We added an extra "@" to the emails to reduce spam. (c) OPCUG 2006. Reprints permission is granted* to non- profit organizations, provided credits is given to the author and The Ottawa PC News. OPCUG request a copy of the newsletter in which reprints appear. *Permission is granted only for articles written by OPCUG members, and not copyrighted by the author. ____________________________ Newsletter by email: To receive the newsletter by e-mail, send a message to listserve@@opcug.ca with the plain text "subscribe NewsletterTXT" or "subscribe NewsletterPDF" (without quotes nor HTML code) in the body of the message. No subject line is required. Cancelling the Paper Newsletter: You can help the environment and save us some costs by sending an email to Mark.Cayer@@opcug.ca asking to cancel the delivery of the paper version of the newsletter (or ask him in person - Mark is usually at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings). Announcements Mailing List: To subscribe to the Announcements List send an email to listserve@@opcug.ca, leave the subject blank and in the body of the message put "subscribe announcements" (without the quotes nor HTML code). Within a couple of minutes you will receive a confirmation message from the list server. OPCUG clock/calendar/calculator and mug: Check out the clock/calendar/calculator and thermal coffee mug sporting our club logo at the back of the auditorium at General Meetings! OPCUG insulated mugs are $15 and OPCUG clocks are $20. Reuse, recycle: Bring your old computer books, software, hardware, and paraphernalia you want to GIVE AWAY to the general meetings, and leave them at the table near the auditorium's entrance. Please limit your magazines to publication dates of less than two years old. If you don't bring something, you may want to TAKE AWAY something of interest, so look in on this area. Any item left over at the end of the meeting will be sent to the... recycle bin.