As we've discussed a few times before, we're starting off a series of talks to follow on from the Installfest. Many details of the organisation remain to be ironed out, so get involved in the discussion on the main list if you are interested, but for now we'll start off with the following:

Sunday 18th August, 2002 - 6:30pm, Comlab

I'll give (probably fairly short) talk on remote access to and from Linux (and indeed UNIX in general) with VNC and X. I'll go through how to get the necessary software, what each can do, and how to use both with Linux as either a server or a client (or indeed both), as well as how to use Windows as a client.

After that we'll have a general question and answer session where hopefully you'll be able to get advice on any problems you're having with Linux.

The meeting will (as always), be followed by drinks at the Lamb and Flag. The Comlab entrance is from Parks Road and there are maps at http://www.comlab.ox.ac.uk/archive/ox/maps.html

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In addition, just a reminder about the GLLUG Bletchley Park Trip also this Sunday - Bletchley Park is only an hour or so's drive from Oxford so you can come to our talk afterwards :-)

Email richard@vmlinuz.org if you're interested, or update http://wiki.vmlinuz.org/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/BletchleyParkInterestList directly if you're happy to use a wiki. (Can use comments field to offer/request transport.)

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Advance notice - September's beginning-of-the-month talk (on Sunday September 1st) will be:

Valgrind - An Open-Source Memory Debugger for x86-linux - Julian Seward

Valgrind is a GPL'd tool to help you find memory-management problems in your programs.

You can use it to debug more-or-less any dynamically-linked ELF Linux x86 executable, without modification, recompilation, or anything. It works by translating x86 code to instrumented x86 code, on the fly i.e. a virtual machine.

Valgrind can detect problems such as:

* Use of uninitialised memory; * Reading/writing memory after it has been free'd; * Reading/writing off the end of malloc'd blocks; * Reading/writing inappropriate areas on the stack; * Memory leaks - where pointers to malloc'd blocks are lost forever; * Passing of uninitialised and/or unaddressible memory to system calls; * Mismatched use of malloc/new/new [] vs free/delete/delete [].

Julian Seward

Compiler hacker and open-source contributor. Worked recently on the Glasgow Haskell compiler, GHC, which is under a BSD-style license.

Also the author of bzip2 (data compressor), cacheprof (a tool for locating the sources of D-cache misses).