[Lancaster] Greetings + Odds and Sods

[Ken Hough]

Hi Martyn,

Glad to hear that you are still keeping tabs on the Lancaster LUG. Hope 
all is well with you.

Recently, I've been spending time on trying to get some Windoze apps 
running via wine. The apps that I'm interested in are mainly used for 
astronomical image aquisition and processing, particularly 'RegiStax' 
and 'K3CCDTools'. These two apps are more or less the accepted standards 
for use with webcam and other images and are really very good. 
Unfortunately, they are 'closed source'.

I've got RegiStax running under wine/Linux and have been in 
communication the the author. Consequently, there is now a Linux tab on 
the RegiStax web site. This info' is also in the current user manual, so 
I've got a bit of publicity for Linux.

I'm still having problems with K3CCDTools. wine correctly runs the 
K3CCDTools installation file and the appropriate files are installed 
under ~/.wine/drive_c/Program Files directory.

Typically, wine issues a lot of info relating to what it is being called 
upon to do. In this case, I get absolutely nothing. When I enter the 
command 'wine K3CCDTools', there is a short pause before the prompt 
returns. No useful screen output at all!

Any suggestions?

The comment in my previous message (Re: [Lancaster] Fw: Mouse disapears) 
concerning Ubuntu wasn't entirely flippant. I've been playing with it 
and initial attempts with v6.06 resulted in one case in the installer 
crashing (OK, Ubuntu was polite enough to report that the installer had 
crashed), and in the other, reports of packages not installed.

Subsequently, I had a go with v6.10. This was successful, but I found it 
the actual installation to be a bit of a pain.

Firstly, because a complete 'live' installation has to be loaded before 
a 'proper' installation can be done  --- takes some time.
Secondly, the partitioner/formater got itself in a mess  --- it reported 
(on the second page) that one of the partitions that I had correctly 
created (via the first page) was of zero size. I could not proceed and 
had to reboot/reload to clear this.

Also, having this information split between two pages is a nuisance. It 
is neccesary to remember all of the partition info from the first page 
so as to correctly set up the second page   ----  not a patch on the 
SuSE/YAST system.

So far I'm unable to understand why Ubuntu is so popular, except maybe 
for the number of CDs, etc that have been sprinkled around the world. It 
doesn't seem to offer me any advantages over SuSE. What am I missing?

BTW, my attempts to explore Ubuntu again were sparked by the recent 
Microsoft/Novell anouncement. I'm looking to hedge my bets. I like SuSE, 
but I don't want Microsoft to be calling the shots or trying to provide 
any so called 'genuine advantages' for Linux users.

Best wishes for Xmas & New Year

Regards

Ken Hough