[Hudlug] Hello guys! Remember me?

[Paul Brook]

On Sunday 22 April 2007 21:39, Sarah Burgess wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Remember me?!  I know it's been an awfully long time since I've been to the
> meetings.

Good to hear from you.

> What's the attendance like nowadays?  Is it still the same old crowd or do
> we have some fresh faces?

We've been getting reasonable attendances recently. Typically 6-10 with a 
mixture of old and new people (in both senses ;-)

> I have a couple of reasons for getting in touch.  Firstly, I hope I'll be
> able to start attending meetings again, and maybe even bring along a friend
> or two.  But I didn't just want to turn up out of the blue!

You're more than welcome, and attendance seems to be consistent enough that 
you wouldn't be totally wasting your time.

> Secondly, I'm thinking of buying a new laptop and wanted some advice as
> I've no experience of installing linux on modern hardware.  My existing
> machines are rather old!  I'd want to dual-boot windows and debian (or a
> debian-derived distro).  

Mostly it's a case of put the install CD in and cross your fingers. Even the 
Debian installer is reasonably civilised nowadays!
Ubuntu and Fedora generally have fairly slick installers.

> Anyone have experience of dual booting with Vista, 
> or would XP be a better choice?  I'm hopeless at making decisions when it
> requires parting with relatively large amounts of cash, so any pointers
> would really help ;-)

The only thing to watch out for is that Vista changed NTFS (Again!). I'm not 
sure if linux knows how to read the new format.

Other than that, linux doesn't now or care about the difference. It's entirely 
a question of how much soul you want to sell to Microsoft, which is offtopic 
for this list. My personal opinion on this is that Vista is slower, and 
contains all the DRM bits necessary to prevent you doing anything useful.

My main warning when buying a new laptop is to beware of ATI graphics 
hardware. Their linux support is sketchy at best. nvidia is ok if can put up 
with evil binary kernel modules, or only want 2D. Intel are actively 
cooperating with open source drivers, so have by far the best linux support.

Paul