[Nottingham] NLUG Desktop Fix-it Evening - my writeup

[Michael Erskine]

NLUG Desktop Fix-it Evening

Last night's NLUG meeting was quite a success: for some time
I've been wanting to run some more meetings for the
struggling Linux users in our area who need that final bit
of assistance to get it all running smoothly, and with an
open slot in our tech meetings schedule I decided we should
have a "bring your own box" night.

We managed to get the Navigation Inn as our venue again but
not on our usual night. It worked out pretty good however to
shift from Weds to Thurs and we got a pretty good turnout.
People bringing PCs by car were able to quickly drop off the
kit before driving round to Castle Boulevard to park up; I'm
quite impressed with the availability of nearby free
parking considering the city center location of this venue.

I was designated-driver for the Sherwood contingent (myself
an Martin G), and we were armed with laptops (mine the
headless 1GHz MAME machine), LAN switches, CAT5, data
projector (to act as my monitor!), etc. 

We had the computers set up in no time but had a bit of a
shortage of monitors, keyboards and power leads so we had to
do a bit of time-sharing on the available peripherals!

Newcomer, Ray had a multi-boot AMD Duron 800 with SUSE 10.2,
an old Mandriva install, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. The
XP install had wiped out the master boot record (surprise,
surprise!) and so the Linux installs were rendered
"invisible". We knew exactly what the problem was but we had
to wait for a keyboard so we moved on to another issue.

Pat had brought his desktop PC and wanted to get Qemu, Xen,
and Wine running on it: enter resident virtualisation
expert, Martin G! First we had to access the packages from a
magazine cover-DVD without a DVD drive on the machine: our
impromptu LAN came to the rescue here and this uncovered an
issue with the Apache install on Martin G's laptop. More
experts were on hand (inc. Michael of TuxGames) to examine
the Apache install while Martin G got on with setting up
Qemu etc.

Andy B and Stef were discussing their quandry of cloning
BootCamp installs over firewire on 50-60 Apple Intel boxes.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to bring much to the table!

Marcel had brought in his excellent laptop and apologised
for not having anything broken to fix. I suggested that he
choose something to break and I think Martin Lomas gave him
a hand there!

With my MAME laptop through the data projector I was able to
demonstrate my dual-PlayStation2-to-USB adapter to Patrick
Gustafson by playing Salamander projected on the wall!

When a keyboard became spare we moved on to Ray's master
boot record. We booted Knoppix and confirmed that it was
XP's fault: using "dd -if=/dev/hda bs=512 count=1 | strings"
we could see the usual Windows boot record text. We were
able to mount and read the many partitions from the Knoppix
desktop and set about a search for the grub config. A few
attempts to chroot into the SUSE partition and run
grub-install proved impossible due to some permissions
problem with /dev/null (of all things). Enter resident gub
expert, Roger Light! He hand-copied a grub config from
another machine and had a grub MBR installed pretty quickly.
For some reason grub wouldn't provide the desired list of
boot options so I resorted to lateral thinking and booted
from Ray's SUSE 10.2 DVD to see if any repair options were
available. SUSE had a plethora of diagnostic and repair
options and it was able to automatically construct a grub
multi-boot menu for us before closing time!

I thoroughly enjoyed this meeting and I think we should hold
these events quite regularly as it really helps people out
and shares those gems of information that can really make a
difference.

Regards,
Michael Erskine.

-- 
What passes for woman's intuition is often nothing more than man's
transparency.
		-- George Nathan
Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com