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

[Martin]

Michael Erskine wrote:
> NLUG Desktop Fix-it Evening
> 
> Last night's NLUG meeting was quite a success: for some time
[---]

Michael, good idea and good writeup.


[---]
> 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.

Should we alternate between Weds & Thurs? How many people would this 
affect or indeed prefer this?


[---]
> 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". ...

I suspect that one of the Mandriva partitions had been overwritten by 
WinXP and then there was a little confusion due to the other multiple 
partitions of parts of whichever multiple distros.


[---]
> Andy B and Stef were discussing their quandry of cloning
> BootCamp installs over firewire on 50-60 Apple Intel boxes.

I've just done a multiple machine "ghosting" using Ubuntu live cds and 
deft use of bzip2, fifos, and "ssh -c blowfish" to optimise wifi 
bandwidth to 12 machines. Linux is indeed very flexible!

But there must be a (better solution) single disk open source "ghosting" 
of "dd | bzip" solution out there somewhere that supports tcp/udp 
multicast...?


> Marcel had brought in his excellent laptop and apologised

And a very beautiful machine too. No chance for me to beat him at 3d chess!


> 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!

Nicely entertaining too over a beer :-)


[---]
> 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
[---]

The projector view of hackings in progress was very good fun to watch! A 
little like spectating at a cricket match or watching a "Dr Kildare" 
operation...


> I thoroughly enjoyed this meeting and I think we should hold
> these events quite regularly as it really helps people out

I agree.


The evening has spawned a few talks interesting to those there. Looks 
like our calender will get updated in advance rather than retrospectively!

1: Database bashing: from csv to MySQL/Postgres to a pretty web page
2: How to compile your first piece of source code
3: Desktop hints and tips: Where to click!


Good interesting fun.

Cheers all,
Martin

-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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