Contents:

• This month's meeting
• Meeting Location
• Last month's meeting
• Next month's meeting
• Library Notes

Win4lin & VMware: Running Windows Applications on Linux

The next meeting of the Front Range UNIX Users Group (FRUUG) will be held at 4:00 P.M. on Thursday, October 11th.

Despite their best intentions to use only open source applications, many Linux users (even the dedicated ones!) have a regular need to run Windows applications. For example, it is difficult to find a Linux office suite that properly reads all Microsoft Office files. (It is hard to hit a moving target!) Also, Linux does not yet offer a personal/small business accounting package with all of the features of Quicken, including downloading credit card and investment transactions. So, at least for now, many Linux users still need to run a few Windows applications.

If you don't have the budget or space for multiple computers in your office/home, the usual solution is to partition your PC's disk, and dual boot Windows and Linux. However, using a dual boot PC can be painful because of the time you waste shutting down one operating system, and rebooting another operating system. Fortunately, there are Linux programs that allow a Linux user to run Microsoft Windows applications while simultaneously running Linux. Joe VanAndel will present a brief overview and demonstrations of VMware (www.vmware.com) and Win4Lin (www.win4lin.com).

Joe VanAndel is a software engineer at NCAR, who writes programs that process data produced by weather radars. In addition to serving on the FRUUG executive committee, his interests include the Python programming language, Linux, bicycling, and racquetball.

Meeting Location

This meeting will be in room 123 of the CU Academic Computing Center building at Arapahoe and Marine Streets in Boulder. Marine St intersects Arapahoe at 38th St; the Computing Center is on the southwest corner.

Our Last Meeting

Notes and resources from our past meetings are available at http://www.fruug.org/mtgarchive/index.html.

Our Next Meeting

Meetings that we are planning for the next few months include the following:

• Managing your Storage Area Network
• Home Automation for the do-it-yourselfer and the off-the-shelfer (December 5).
• DNS Update

Our meeting on Sun's Jxta Peer-to-Peer technologies has been postponed indefinitely due to the events of September 11. One option is to hold the meeting by speakerphone and show the presentation slides in the meeting room. Do you think this would work? Would you come? Let us know your opinion by e-mailing fruug at fruug.org.

FRUUG Library Notes

Softpro books has donated a $20 gift certificate for a lucky FRUUG member; they're at Baseline and Foothills in Boulder. Enter the drawing at http://www.fruug.org/library/giveaway.html/.

It's been a while since our last meeting, so we have quite the selection of new additions to the FRUUG library from our publisher friends, including:

From Addison Wesley:

• Building Imaging Applications With Java Technology, by Lawrence H. Rodrigues
• Building Parsers with Java, by Steven John Metsker
• Effective Java Programming Language Guide, by Joshua Bloch
• Inside Servlets, Second Edition, Server-Side Programming for the Java Platform, by Dustin R. Callaway
• J2EE Technology in Practice, Building Business Applications with the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Editino, by Rick Cattell, et. al.
• Java.rmi, The Remote Method Invocation Guide, by Esond Pitt and Kathleen McNiff
• Java Enterprise Programming with IBM Websphere, by Kyle Brown, et. al.
• The Jiro Technology Programmer's Guide and Federated Management Architecture, by Paul Monday and William Connor
• The Linux Companion for System Administrators, Second Edition, by Jochen Hein
• The Practice of System and Network Administration, by Thomas Limoncelli and Christine Hogan
• The Practical SQL Handbook, Using SQL Variants, by Judith S. Bowman, Sandra L. Emerson, and Marcy Darnovsky
• Software Fundamentals, Collected Papers by David L. Parnas
• The Tini Specification and Developer's Guide, by Don Loomis, with foreward by FRUUG's own Tom Cargill

From O'Reilly & Associates:

• Essential SNMP, by Doublas R. Mauro and Kevin J. Schmidt
• Java Cookbook, Solutions and Examples for Java Developers, by Ian F. Darwin
• Java Security, Writing and Deploying Secure Applications, by Scott Oaks
• Learning Perl, 2nd Edition, by Randal Schwartz and Tom Christiansen
• Peer-to-Peer, Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies, edited by Andy Oram
• Programming Web Services with XML-RPC, by Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, & Ed Dumbill
• Server Load Balancing, by Tony Bourke
• Web Caching, Reducing Network Traffic, by Duane Wessels

From The USENIX Association:

• Proceedings of the 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, June 2001
• FREENIX Track Proceedings from the 2001 USENIX Annual Technical Conference, Boston, June 2001

You may check out books using your business card as your library card; you must be on the membership list to check books out. Books are due at the meeting following the one in which they are checked out.

Remember that your FRUUG membership entitles you to discounts on your book orders from both New Riders Publishing and O'Reilly & Associates; refer to the FRUUG Web site for details.