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

[Dave Smith]

Ken,

> 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.

I'm pretty sure I do have at least one lying around that's just a box 
and PSU, but I'll have to double check it still has it's PSU... :-)
I'm in a clearing-out process at the minute anyway, so you're more than 
welcome to it although, as hinted at earlier, I don't know when I could 
get it to you as I'll be absent from the LUG Meet this week. I probably 
have another box that has a Mobo / CPU in it as well, but I'll have to 
rummage through the loft to confirm that.

> 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.

I haven't played with v5 yet, but I have to admit to finding the same 
the last time I tried v4.

> 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.

Yeh, I still haven't tried a GUI installation of Debian but, saying 
that, I never really found the text installer to be quite as bad as it 
was made out to be.

> 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.

/signed.

> 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.

Hmmm, I need to get OO.o 3...

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

I'd agree with this, although saying that I'm still on Ubuntu for my 
work laptop - mainly because I'm lazy... :)

Best,

Dave