[Wiltshire] Anyone near Melksham?

[David Fletcher]

On Sat, 2010-10-16 at 11:24 +0100, dianne reuby wrote:
> We have a classroom at the computer museum in Theatre Square - at the
> moment it's used for the Childrens club on Saturday mornings, and
> we'll be running the BBC click 55s+ PC intro sessions, plus occasional
> meetings. We'd be interested in being involved - we've got internet
> access and a couple of us are linux users.
> 
> Dianne
> 

I've left this alone for a while because of the ancient and IMHO totally
unsuitable machinery that was brought along to the last install fest. I
feel that what we need to be doing is recommending a list of tried and
tested, known to work without problems, high quality, current computer
components with a decent level of performance. Having just built a new
system for my son I think I am now in a position to do this.

My recommendation is:-
Asus M4A79XTD EVO Motherboard
Asus EAH4350 SILENT graphics card
AMD Athlon II 420e processor
Crucial ECC memory
Antec EarthWatts 380 power supply
Plus suitable hard drive, DVD writer, case, keyboard, mouse and monitor
which could possibly be recycled from another system like I did.

Dianne has kindly offered suitable premises, so what we need, if this is
to be done, is some _reliable_ volunteers who know how to put systems
together and have the patience to advise and assist folks who may have
never seen the inside of a PC let alone build one.

The next LUG meeting is in 8 days time so I thought this would be a good
time to raise the subject again, and hopefully get some interested
people and more than the two attendees that we had this month.

Dave


BTW the most useful Linux things I've learned about recently are:-

avahi
If I need to do something like
ssh admin at gandalf
avahi lets me do
ssh admin at gandalf.local
without messing about setting up fixed IP addresses and hosts files on
desktop machines. It appears to be ready set up and working on Ubuntu.

sshfs
Lets me mount a directory on another computer on the network to a mount
point on my computer and use it as if it were local. Useful for
accessing work on a server? I've not yet tried it with things like Open
Office but the video player works just fine with it.

googleearth-package
Available in the Ubuntu repositories. Using the command
make-googleearth-package --force
it builds a custom debian Google Earth installer for my 64 bit Maverick
system. There's a lot of compiler warnings on the way but it works OK.
To install the result I used 
sudo gdebi googleearth_5.2.1.1588+0.5.7-1_amd64.deb
My menu entry was wrong, possibly because I restored everything from a
previous Kubuntu Hardy install, but using
which googleearth
allowed me to locate the executable and edit the menu entry to fix it.