[Lancaster] LUG meeting on coming Wednesday, 5th Nov 2008

[Ken Hough]

HI folks!

Does anyone by any chance have an old ATX box with power supply that they 
don't want? I have enough other bits incl a mobo to make up a spare PC. I do 
have a processor, but this is rather slow, so if anyone has a spare and 
reasonably quick Pentium or AMD K6II, that would help.

On another tack, I've been playing with Debian! Yes, folks your read that 
correctly.  :-)  I had installed SUSE v11.0 on my new desktop PC and was 
impressed with it, but have discoved a few wobblies.

This gave me a problem. Do I stay with v11.0, or wait a couple of months for 
the full release of SUSE v11.1? I decided on the latter and in the meantime, 
decided to have a play with a few other recent distros.

I have a DVD containing a pre-release version of Debian 5, so decided to fire 
it up. One of the advantages of my new quad core PC is that installations run 
VERY quickly.

So far, I have to admit to being impressed. Unlike earlier versions of Debian, 
v5 wasn't the expected pain in the tail to set up.

Firstly, I tried the graphical installation. Compared with other recent 
distros, I found this to be relatively primitive. Anyway, I cocked up this 
attempt. My own fault! So I had another go using the non-graphical 
installation. This went well so I now have a dual booting Debian 5/WinXP 
system. Don't worry! Linux will still be my OS of choice.

So far everything seems to work well under Debian 5. I've got my mail stuff 
transfered across from my Athlon work horse and working. I haven't yet tried 
to set up my Analogue/Digital TV/FM radio card, but everything else was 
recognised and configured without any input from me. A great improvement on 
earlier versions of Debian that I've tried.

I've installed Open Office v3. This installed alongside v2 so I can run 
either. Open Office v3.0 seems to be very good and looked to be much more 
polished than v2.

Provided that I don't find too many serious wobblies in Debian 5, I might stay 
with it. A lot better than Ubuntu!!!

See you on Wednesday

Ken Hough