[SLUG] October meeting

[john at johnallsopp.co.uk]

Good work Bob, thanks for that.

I got in touch with Linda (at the Valley Bar) re setting up a wireless
LAN and broadband so we can use it in our meetings. I thought that
might make things a little more interesting as we can actually attempt
real things. With luck and a fair wind I'll have that installed next
time, although she hasn't come back to me about it yet.

I was considering buying a laptop too, but that will have to wait I
think.

Cheers
J

> 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.
>
> **********************************************************************
>
> 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".
>
> *******************************************************************************
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>