Sydney Linux Users' Group

If you're doing your first Linux install, you're probably best off buying a set of CDs. They're cheap and contain archives of software in additional to the basic system.

• Most newsagents sell the popular Linux Pocketbooks and Linux Minibooks, which come with recent CDs full of software and a book of instructions, hints and tips.
• EverythingLinux.com.au sells many Linux products, including distributions, books and merchandise.
• lankum.com - the Australian Linux/BSD Online Store sells low cost Linux CDs, applications, merchandise and books sells various CDs and O'Reilly books.
• The Co-op Bookshop sells some Linux CDs and claims to sell the Linux Journal as well.
• UNSW Bookshop

Various local mirror sites host free software projects including full Linux distributions.

• Linux Australia
• Independant Service Providers (ISP)
• Pacific Internet
• 3fl (Only available from networks connected to the PIPE Sydney peering network)
• UNSW Computer Science/Engineering
• OptusNet
• AARNet Mirror
• Planet Mirror

General information on broadband access using Linux is available in the Cable Modem Providers HOWTO document from the Linux Documentation Project. Here are some other relevant links for using local services:

Optus@Home

• linuxathome.net
• O@H Linux Gateway Home (pengu)
• Connecting to O@H with dhcpd and linux (graybeard)

Telstra

• bpalogin

There are quite a few projects around Sydney building wireless networks. Some of these projects are beginning to link up to each other. Terry Collins has created a page to list these projects and the people involved. He writes:

http://www.woa.com.au/linux/lists/slugwireless.html

This page exists solely to list and link people interested in getting into wireless. If you are interested, perhaps you might like to send me your details for addition. This way, there is a place for all those people interested to find out about each other.

Time servers

You can keep your computer synchronised to standard time servers on the Internet using the Network Time Protocol. You will need to configure your ntp software to synchronise to one of the local NTP servers.

Debian apt sources

Users of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution can update their systems over the network. The following sources work well locally (place in /etc/apt/sources.list):

## Security
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-security stable/updates main

## Australia Stable
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian stable main
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable non-US/main

# Source
deb-src http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian stable main
deb-src http://ftp.au.debian.org/pub/debian-non-US stable/non-US main

A full list of public mirrors is located at /usr/share/doc/dpkg-ftp/README.mirrors.txt.gz on your Debian system.