[SLUG] October meeting

[Bob Garrood]

Hi

Here is my version of Tuesday's meeting.  Corrections and suggestions for 
items that might be added to the next meeting, would be welcome.  The guide to 
hard drive replacement someone asked about is at 
http://www.techbuilder.org/recipes/60403842    but it uses commercial 
software.

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The October meeting of SLUG took place at the Valley.   As well as regular 
faces there was one new member, Malcolm, who has recently installed Fedora.  
We discussed problems with this and other distributions, particularly to a 
dial-up connection.  No one knew an easy way to of partition hard disks 
before installation, especially using non-destructive tools such as 
GNUparted.

We talked about text editors.   The three most widely mentioned were Kate, 
SciTE and vi.

Wine, the windows emulator, was mentioned.   Everyone seems to have tried it, 
and to agree that, though it can be good, it still has not passed the stage 
of being promising.

We noted that, as part of the Scarborough Digital festival, Microsoft is 
giving 3 presentations (out of 7) and one will be open to humble people like 
us.  It is on Saturday 13th October in the St Nicholas Hotel at.   It will be 
about their marvelous new operating system, vista.   We felt that as many 
people as possible should go and express their appreciation of the stability 
and security offered by Microsoft's previous operating systems.  At least 
that is what we thought on Tuesday.  When I checked the times on the SAVE9 
website, all references to Microsoft had disappeared.  Does any one know 
about this? 

We thought that criticisms of Microsoft vista's security arrangements in the 
press were biased, and that their new incentive for programmers - the "Patch 
Of The Day" awards, would solve all their problems.

For the next meeting on Monday 6th November, John's offer of a talk on 
installing a webcam was gratefully accepted.  Another possible topic could be 
on the difficulty of finding documentation which illustrates the use of 
graphical tools, such as Qt and Tk, within scripting languages such as Ruby 
and Perl.  I offered to produce a simple example.

We thought it would be good if equipment were made available collectively.   
Something like one person bringing a laptop, one a TFT screen and one a pair 
of speakers.   There might be compatibility problems at first.  The speaker 
could bring the presentation on a flash memory stick.

Would there be any objection to allowing a student of internet computing from 
Scarborough Campus to use our website (or perhaps the mailing list) in a 
survey of reasons for people using, or not using, Linux?

Best beer at the meeting was York, "Ghost Centurion".

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Bob