[Gloucs] Gloucester, Presario, SuSE

[John McKeown]

WiII will be in Leicester for a few days so won't be around sorry.
We need date/venue for Gloucester for September, November
someone at the June meeting volunteered to investigate?

I was in Cheltenham yesterday and had a last-minute idea to make
a poster and walk around getting some places to put them up - one=20
in Equals - two in web-cafes - one in computer shop - one in library.=20

Traumatic Tale
Last week a friend visited from California. He'd heard of Linux and
we installed it on his new Dell Presario 2500. Mandrake 9.1 didn't=20
get started even with "nofirewire". SuSE 8.2 ntfsresize (via Rescue=20
boot) no joy. PCWorld told me PartitionMagic =A329.99 but turned
out to be 49.99 - then saw SuSE 8.1 bundling PartitionMagic and=20
8.1OD bundling Acronis. I got both and went home to search info.=20
=46ound that only Acronis knew ReiserFS, so I opened that. But it=20
messed up NTFS partition, and XP wouldn't boot, aaargh.=20

Knoppix went on with nofirewire nousb nopcmcia, but tiny screen.
Lindows like Mandrake couldn't cope with the firewire. SuSE was=20
the only distro that went on smoothly, and downloading some
Radeon IGP drivers all well. My friend needs to restore XP at=20
home and then use PartitionMagic and re-install SuSE.

But he has 8.1 'Office Desktop' which I now realise lacks Apache,=20
MySQL etc. SuSE updates already installed packages via FTP,=20
but how does it install new packages that aren't on CDs?

regards,
John