Table of Contents

ExpNews

Calendar of Events:

Vicki Antes

Quote of the Month

Hewlett-Packard Goofed

Crimson Tide

Adventures with Riley

 or How I Bought a Workstation Part I

Our Principals:

150MHz Pentium

Post Finances

FreeBSD

Our Creed:

Summer Camp

Up-an-Coming Post Expenses

Up-an-Coming Member Expenses

Explorer Post 369:

Maintaining packages for Debian

Hooked and didn't know it.

Our E-Mail Addresses

Calendar of Events:

Vicki Antes

The Scouter

Vicki Antes Became an Exploring Executive on April 1, 1995. Vicki began her Scouting career in 1988 as an In-School Scouting Coordinator. In 1992, Vicki became a receptionist, then in January, 1995 she assumed the North Team Field Secretary Position. As Exploring Executive, Vicki will be responsible for delivering the traditional Career Exploring program in Franklin County.

Quote of the Month

Edmund Burke

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing.

Hewlett-Packard Goofed

The Wall Street Journal

HP disclosed a chip flaw in some of its workstations, as many as 20,000. This chip may cause the system to crash. Most workstations that are effected are in the HP9000 series shipped since November. HP announced that they will repair or replace the faulty systems for free.

I think it is nice to see a computer company own up to their mistakes instead of stating most users will never need the nth decimal place.

Crimson Tide

DJ Gregor

Staring Denzel Washington and Jean Hackman

What do you like to see when you go to the movies? If you like a good plot, suspense, action, and a number of surprises, then Crimson Tide is your kind of movie.

Most of this movie takes place on a US submarine that has been dispatched to the Arabian Gulf because of a Russian coup. While there, the submarine gets a message that the Russians are fueling their nuclear ICBMs. The Alabama is given orders that the ICBMs are getting ready to launch, and it is to destroy the ICBM sites if no further instructions are received within one hour. The Alabama gets noticed by a Russian submarine, and gets fired upon. While in combat, the communications antenna of the Alabama is destroyed in the middle of receiving another order. The captain and XO (eXecutive Officer) of the ship need to agree to fire the missiles, but here they disagree--The captain wants to fire the missiles, but the XO thinks that the partial order was an order to stand-down the missiles. The XO wants to wait until the communications equipment is repaired to see what the partial order was. This is the main conflict of the movie, and causes the captain and XO to be in constant battle. You can find out the rest of the plot when you see the movie.

The Explorer Code

As an Explorer-

I believe that American's Strength lies in her trust in God and in the courage and strength of her people

I will, therefore, be faithful in my religious duties and will maintain a personal sense of honor in my own life.

I will treasure my American heritage and will do all I can to preserve and enrich it.

I will recognize the dignity and worth of my fellowmen and will use fair play and goodwill in dealing with them.

I will acquire the exploring attitude that seeks the truth in all things and adventure on the frontiers of our changing world.

Summer Camp is around the corner!

Adventures with Riley - or How I Bought a Workstation Part I

Andy Drake, Secretary/Treasurer, Explorer Post 369

The time had finally arrived when I thought that I was ready for a workstation. That is to say, I had spent nearly 6 years with my trusty Amiga, and through various incarnations of Unix, I survived pretty fairly on that platform. The thought had crossed my mind several times before about buying a workstation, but everything changed this spring when I a combination of things spurred my interest.

First, as part of my job, I visit the Ohio State University Network Operations Center pretty regularly. While there, I fell in love with a Sparc 5 that was smirched between a NeXT Cube and some DEC equipment. All I could think of was two words - "Supreme coolness." From that point, I really had to have one, and that very day I went to the OSU bookstore, which was a SUN academic reseller, to check out how much a decent Sparc 5 would run. Was I shocked! While the Sparc 5 is one of Sun's more affordable products, any kind of decent machine was still about $7000, without OS. Yep, this was a little out of my price range. And, I got to thinking, do I really need this much power? "No," I said to myself, "I'll settle for a Sparc 2, even though it doesn't have the groovy case and overall supreme coolness of the Sparc 5." Well, after subscribing to the misc.computers.workstations.forsale news group, I found out that even a Sparc 2 decently equipped was still selling used for $2300 to $3500, and this was for a machine with enough ram to really make things fun. "OK, fine" I thought, "I could live with something not quite so fast, I'll downgrade to a Sparc 1+." After a couple of friends were able to buy Sparc 1+ machines on closeout several months back for around $695 with monitor, keyboard and 8 megs of RAM, I thought I could still afford to spend a little on RAM and disk space to make things interesting. Nope, I could only find a smattering of Sparc 1's for around $1600 - 2000. Still too expensive. What was I to do? Turn to PC (blech, Pentium? NEVER!) or Power Mac and hope Solaris is ported some time soon?

Bzzzzt.

Well, the second turn in the series of events helped me narrow my focus a bit. Since I work for Academic Technology Services here at Ohio State, we maintain about 5 different platforms of machines, ranging from your basic PC clone (yes, PS/2 as well), to Macs, Amigas and NeXTs, with a couple of Sun 3/60's thrown in for fun. This gives me a lot of exposure to what I don't want to run, and everything I saw on a PC, I wouldn't want to run! The story continues when one day, we received a couple of NeXTstations in from storage. On a whim, I set a machine up and put it on our office network in place of an old Mac IIci. After a couple of days of using it and getting used to things, I thought it might not be so bad to look into other platforms in the workstation category, which included both NeXT and Hewlett-Packard. The clincher came when I saw that HP machines were almost as much as Suns were, and there was really no way for me to know what they were like with regards to parts and service. My department simply didn't handle the platform, so I had no way of really testing out the machine for long periods of time. This left me with a couple of options, keep looking for a Sun, or expand that search to include a NeXT as well - I had really gotten used to the slick block box on my desk at work, even if it was named "tech-serv-Mac3".

Our Principals:

1) Honor before all else.

2) The difference between a winner and a looser is that the winner tried one more time.

3) K.I.S.M.I.F.

150MHz Pentium

Dow Jones Technology Update 4/3/95

Intel expects to introduce a lightning-fast, 150 MHz Pentium chip by the end of the year. The new chip will be 25% faster than the current Pentium, which runs at 120 MHz. Intel will introduce a 130 MHz Pentium within two months. By rolling out faster Pentiums every few months and cutting prices on older models, Intel hopes to widen the gap between it and its competitors, such as Advanced Micro Devices and the Power PC chip consortium of IBM, Apple and Motorola

Post Finances

Explorer Post 369 has -$5.00

FreeBSD

Lucas James Lucas.James@ldjpc.apana.org.au

Want to run a serious OS?

FreeBSD - a serious and FREE OS.

Got a old 386/486/Pentium that you want to run a REAL Operating System on? Then run FreeBSD. It is a 4.4BSD-lite based un*x for the 386 class of machines.

Yes it is a true 32-bit (with some 64-bit parts) multitasking (and soon - multiprocessing) operating system. All you need is a 386SX-16 and 4M of ram. I would recommend at least a 486DX-33 with 8M. I personally use a 486DX-33 with 16M. A minimum install will cost about 60M in hard disk space. (Although I would suggest a workable system, inc. X, a few applications, programming environment, would need more like 200M. But considering most computers these days come with a minimum of 270M, this shouldn't be a problem.)

This version of un*x is much closer to a commercial implementation than linux. We can run commercial applications! (most BSDI/386 applications will work unmodified under FreeBSD). The big un*x vendors (i.e. SunOS, Ultrix, DEC OSF/1) are based around the BSD kernel, as is FreeBSD. As a result, the code is stable.

One advantage over linux is the fact that we have ONE distribution. This is less confusing to the beginner. The main ftp server at Walnut Creek is a Pentium running FreeBSD. (wcarchive.cdrom.com.) It is the main ftp site for FreeBSD. If you want to purchase a CD with FreeBSD, send some mail to info@cdrom.com., and follow the instructions.

Our Creed:

Exploring: Enthusiasm, Energy, & Excellence.

Explorer Post & Troop 369 will be attending Summer Camp the week of July 2-8, at The Chief Logan Scout Reservation. Cost will be $150.00 payable on or before June 20th. You will need a Summer Camp Physical.

Explorer members under the age of 18 can work on merit badges, if they wish.

As an Explorer you will not have any set time schedule to attend to while at Camp. You will be responsible for you own activities. Of course you can join in on any of those offered at the camp. Go boating, hiking, canoeing... You can even work on your frontiers men.

Up-an-Coming Post Expenses

12/01/95 Post Charter $30.00

12/01/95 Post Insurance $85.00

Up-an-Coming Member Expenses

Summer Camp $150.00

Registration 11/01/95 $15.00

Explorer Post 369:

Explorer Post 369 was chartered on December 31, 1994 to the Reformation Luthern Church.

Explorer Post 369 specializes in UNIX for Programmers while emphasizing a deep theme of Engineering Computer Information & Science

Membership in Explorer Post 369 is open to young men and women between the ages of 14 [and in high school] and not yet 20. Annual Membership fees are $15.00.

Maintaining packages for Debian

D.J. Gregor, <dgregor@coil.com>

Debian GNU/Linux is a distribution of Linux that is becoming easier to install, use, and maintain, and it is being used by more and more people every day. I have decided to use and maintain packages for Debian for a number of reasons.

First, Debian is growing faster than any other Linux distribution. When a Debian maintainer sees a package that he wants to see in Debian, he makes it into a Debian package. The package is then available for any Debian users.

Second, Debian is extremely modular. I can decide what packages I do and do not want to install; I don't have to install a whole set of packages. If I find a new package that I like, like gnuchess, for example, I can install only that package, and not a whole set of games. Also, if I decide that a package is taking up too much hard drive space, I just remove it, instead of trying to manually remove binary, library, and configuration files like I would have to do in other distributions.

Third, Debian has a large and diverse development group. Unlike most distributions, Debian is maintained by fifty or more developers. If a user wants to become a Debian developer, they can join in and start working on packages. Also, with a diverse development group, there are many experts on a wide range of UNIX topics. The large development group also makes sure that the distribution will not fall by the wayside the way it could with only one developer. Probably the most important reason for having a large development group is that every package has an "owner" who is responsible for keeping it updated, and the owner, or maintainer is usually an expert in the area of the package.

Lastly, the commercial use of Debian is another very good aspect. Every package in the main distribution of Debian is allowed to be used for commercial use with no royalties or fees of any kind. For all of the above reasons I have chosen to be a Debian user, and also a Debian package maintainer. Maybe you would like Debian to be the Linux distribution of your choice....

Hooked and didn't know it.

Vick Vickery, Sign's Up.

I read a news article recently from Rochester, Minn. It told of a lady who backed her car from a parking lot at a local hospital and drove about three miles. She became very concerned in that a small car was following her at every turn. She stopped in a service station to get help. Upon examination, she reported to police this incredible story... she had accidently hooked her trailer hitch under the bumper of a small car and towed it away with her.

Every good Scout leader has had a similar experience. One day you discover a small boy making every turn which you make. He walks like you, talks like you, and tires in every wa to be like you. You just accidentally, before you realized it, attached yourself to a young person. This special attachment is part of the magic of Scouting. What a challenging responsibility. May God give us the wisdom and courage to lead them in paths of righteousness.

Our E-Mail Addresses

Committee Member:
Herb Docken Institutional Representative
Ralph Maurer Committee Chairman
Tom Niedzielski
Steve Weller

Adults Members:
James D. Corder -
Scot M. Warmbeir scowar@symix.com

Consultants:
David J. Alden

Honorary Members:
Daniel Jackson daniel@cougar.multiline.com.au
Lucas James jj@ldjpc.apana.org.au
Alan Jones alanjones:alan@sawasdi.apana.org.au
Sara Jones

Youth Members:
DJ Gregor dgregor@bronze.coil.com
Joe Harvey joharvey@freenet
David Wolfe dwolfe@freenet
Mike Turner mturner@freenet
Andy Drake drake.73@osu.edu
Roy MD Niedzielski Niedzielski.3@osu.edu
Stephen M. Gladfelter gladfelter.6@osu.edu

Post-Toadies:
Sam Page
Chris Toady
Matt Toady

Remember to add [.columbus.oh.us] to the end of the freenet accounts!!!