[Lancaster] Meeting Minutes (and Other Things Too!)

[David Smith]

Agreed, sounds pretty good to me as well.

I'll have to put my mind to thinking up something useful to do at some 
point as well. I don't have anything right now but I'm sure I can try to 
cobble something together at some point.

In other news, I too decided to finally give myself the kick over the 
edge and give OpenSuSE 11.0 a try, complete with KDE 4 on the old laptop.

Whilst it wasn't the fastest booting up (old laptop, understandable) I 
was still pretty impressed at how smoothly it all ran. The only one 
issue I seemed to have was using Network Manager for accessing my 
wireless connections - it didn't seem to like (read: give me options) 
inserting my WEP code (I know, I know, don't use WEP...).
Other than that things have seemed fine and workable in the limited 
poking around I've done.
As I've heard many, many times, I can agree that Yast is bloomin' 
lovely, and I was impressed at how well the repository stuff seems to 
work, considering my last real experiment with RPM package management 
was YUM back on Yellow Dog something-or-other...

I'm still tied tightly to Apt and Debian-based stuff in general at the 
minute, but I can understand why people like SuSE and can definitely see 
it as being much more usable.

In terms of what I'm planning to do, realistically I'll probably try out 
the default GNOME desktop on it at some point as well, seeing as it 
seemed to seize up a bit when running F-Spot (that I've personally found 
to be my preferred tool for photo management on Linux at the minute) - 
granted, that could well be just down to running F-Spot on top of a 
resource-heavy WM (Gnome or KDE) on top of an old machine... *shrugs* - 
back to XFCE!

Related to something else we mentioned at the last little social - GIMP 
2.6 is now released and, judging by everything I've read, it has opened 
the path to 16-bit handling - planned to be completed early 2009. Could 
be exciting.
I haven't actually tried 2.6 out yet, but everything I've seen / heard 
of it so far makes it look to be a fairly solid improvement.

Best,

Dave

Ken Hough wrote:
> That would be good Wayne.
> 
> I am currently helping to test some software that is aimed at astronomical use 
> and have still to sort out my new PC to be as I want it to be, so am not 
> planning on doing a presentation for at least a few weeks.
> 
> Ken