[Wylug-discuss] last meeting, next meeting...

[Graham Whaley]

Hi all.
 Thanks again for a good meeting - was nice to be able to sit outside
for once rather than dodge the rain.

 Thanks folks for pushing me into trying to fix my boot issue after
having had a couple of beers (I'm still contemplating if playing with
sudo/mount/grub after a couple of beers is a wise idea)... now fixed!
 Some background for those not there - after I did an update on my
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS laptop, it would not boot. Worse, it would only drop
into the BIOS. My guess was either broken disk partitions or broken
GRUB2 :-(  Andrew whipped out his multi-boot USB stick, and we went
and had a poke around and followed a few instructions from the net to
re-initialise grub. Ran into a number of library version dependency
issues and the like, and then the beer sapped my energy :-)

Final solution - after a bit more reading around I settled on giving
'boot-repair' a go:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Boot-Repair
I booted up a Lubuntu (as I already had it on a stick ready to go),
added the repo to the live boot, installed boot-repair, ran it up and
let it do its thing (a little bit of a cop out on the technical
front), and voila - one happy lappy again.  Had to go and tweak the
grub config to reduce the default timeout on the boot menu (who wants
to wait 10 seconds!), but other than that, no serious side effects
that I've seen.

For the next meet I'll try to remember to drag my XPS13 along so you
can have a look/feel (I'm typing this on it right now). Lovely laptop,
but does have some features one should take into consideration:
 - very limited I/O (pretty much 2xUSB3 ports and a display port). I
thus run a USB3 hub on my desk.
 - no-removable battery (well, not without a screwdriver ;-)
 - the touchpad annoys me when I'm typing (but that happens on a lot
of laptops for me - most don't have 'wrist detection' that I'm aware
of).

 Now, there is a topic we can discuss - battery life optimisation on
Linux laptops. It would be nice if it just worked 'out of the box'
I've just been running powertop and turning some things off. Just
figured out that turning power saving mode on for the USB keyboard was
not a smart idea!. Also giving 'TLP' a try on the Ubuntu lappy:
http://linrunner.de/en/tlp/docs/tlp-linux-advanced-power-management.html

And finally - we didn't discuss the next meeting - according to my
calendar it should be July 27th.

 Graham