[Wolves] So Rob did you like your first Lug Meeting?

[Rob Parker]

Yeah, it was great, thanks. As you know I've never been to a LUG meeting
before, and I know they vary from LUG to LUG, and I guessed obviously
you would discuss Linux, though I was not sure how it would be
structured, etc. But now I know it's quite good; although I expect the
meetings at the community centre are more about watching a presentation
more than general chat.

Also I was wondering what distros you all use? From what I heard last
night it seems mainly Ubuntu.

Someone who's name I don't know asked me last night what 'installs' I
have well first the history bit:
*In it must have been, about 2003, my dad and I installed what I think
was Red Hat (before Fedora) on our old Pentium 1 (with MMX!) machine.
This was good but my dad was doing most of it, all I can really remember
was he had to use what must have been console commands to get things
like the sound working, by the way I think it was Gnome, but it only had
on bar.
Anyway for whatever reason we went back to windoze sometime after that.
*I'd been using windoze in this order, 3.1, 95, ME and then XP (all on
the same, only slightly upgraded machine, which took about a minute to
open notepad under XP)
*In 2005, every now and then I would try the latest Mandrake release as
I thought it was the only distro around at the time, yet it never seemed
to like my USB (I had my own 2.1Ghz Tiny machine by then!) and would
freeze during boot on 'Checking for new hardware...' if I had my hp
deskjet 3650 plugged in, which made it useless.
*In 2006 though, Mandrivia 2006 came out!, which actually worked with my
USB and printer. Now at the time a made a friend at my school, who had
never used Linux before, but thought it was 'cool'. So I got Mdv 06
installed and I helped him set it up, which proved trouble on Dell
Optiplex (i think), which problems with things such as his USB keyboard
not always working with grub/lili/whatever_mdv_had.
Anyway we continued in this way for a while, with him once, stupidly
installing EVERY package in the package manager, and then he decided to
do a reinstall (which I would have to do for him), which his BIOS made
hard.
Also my friend had a habit of wanting the latest version of everything,
eg: amarok and little apps of kde-apps.org
Time went by and I found it great how went I got a new sound card  it
played the kde splash sound with no difference (the machine now had 6
speakers!), whereas the supplied drivers wouldn't with all speakers in
windoze, and don't to this day.
*Then shortly after the release [K/X/Ed]Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, I discovered,
Kubuntu, as thanks to Mandrivia defaulting to KDE and having a crap
almost vinilla Gnome, I was a KDE user; So I had heard the craze about
Ubuntu but thought "ugh, it's just crappy Gnome" but then found Kubuntu
which I tried an really liked due to it's up-to-date software and it was
part of this 'Ubuntu thing'. So I showed to my friend and we both
started using it the we went through to Edgy and so on, then we sort of
fell out (he was becoming quite a control freak and cocky about
everything from how good he is a walking to skining or w/e, anyway)
*Then in the summer (of '06) my mum and dad said they'd buy me a laptop,
which I was happy about except we go one from Dabs.com which I had for
about 6 months and I had Kubuntu 6.06 LTS and then 6.10 beta (for a few
minutes before), but then the fan which had always sounding like a lawn
mower stopped working altogether, so we sent it back and they refunded
us.
*So then in around January (07) I decided to get a Lenovo 3000 N100 from
the Linux Emporium, so first of all I shouldn't have hardware issues and
second of all it made by the same company as the ThinkPad (though it
dosen't seem to have inherited much). It came with a 1.6 Ghz Intel [1]
Core Duo aka Intel Centrino Duo, just the model below the one with
hardware vitalisation support annoyingly, a nice nVidia GeForce Go 7900,
which is ruined by it's messily 64Mb of memory and just 512Mb of RAM.
When I got this it booted into a customised Ubuntu (omg, it's Gnome, I
thought) Dapper install so I had a look around Gnome, and suddenly
decided I liked it, it seemed faster and snazzier than KDE, albeit less
configuration options (though most in KDE were really unneeded). So I
upgraded it to 6.10 and then 7.04 when it was final, then 7.10 just
after tribe 5 was released. For some reason Gutsy had problems like not
remembering WEP keys, that Fiesty didn't, but over time, with upgrades
these disappeared, also I had to remove the evms package ever-wise my
HDD and CD/DVD-ROM drive would thrash at boot, until udevd was killed, I
later fofound this was due to the fact the evms is now obsoleted by some
new code in the kernel, and should been removed during the upgrade.

Anyway thats another of that, in my house I currently have:
*My laptop - running Ubuntu 7.10, though I'm about to fresh install due
to what I learnt last night to fix a few probs.
*My Desktop (the 2.1Ghz) - running Ubuntu 7.10, has been since before
final release, like laptop which was because system-config-printers
seemed to have a system where I only need to tick two boxes on each
machine so they could share printers, which worked at first but updates
to cupsys stopped to working, agh!
*My Dad's Desktop - Dual-booting Ubuntu 7.10 and Windozes XP, it's
another Tiny machine, originally came Linspire 4.5 (when Tiny/Tiny.com
still were in business), he mainly uses Ubuntu and has started spreading
it where he works, the IT dept. of GeoPost UK/Parceline, in fact on
colleague was already using Fedora, but tried Ubuntu and found it a lot
better and has apparently upgraded to 7.10 now.
*My Dad's Laptop - Dual-booting Ubuntu 7.10 and Windoze XP, belongs to
company, came only with windozes so has to use that at work.


There networked with a bog-standard Netgear consumer wirless router,
though we have also brought a NSLU2[UK] (still running default
firmware/linux atm) to network a 500Gb usb HDD.





Anyway yeah the meeting was great and I can't (but will have to) wait to
come to the next one.

On Thu, 2007-10-25 at 10:36 +0100, Dave Morley wrote:
> So Rob did you like your first lug meeting?