[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting Sunday 2011-10-02

[Bobbie Sellers]

     Bobbie(myself), John Strazzino, Ken Schaeffer and wife, Jim Stockford.
were the only attendees.  I was wearing my Penguin Painter tee shit from
a small shop in Nihon Machi, SF and my new penguin stuffed toy 3 inches
high was on the table as well as several computer catalogues and Linux
Pro's latest issue.
     Drivers report greater than usual parking problems, perhaps due to the
event being held in Golden Gate Park.  Jim had used a paid lot.

     Strazzino has a fresh used Dell Latitude that will not
boot from the USB port.
     I demoed the late distro, Koppix 6.7 which was the DOM for
Linux Pro issue 130 and which I had put on an 8 GiB usb stick on
my old Compaq CQ60-215DX.   It uses LDXE as a window manager.
It has lots of tools including some that I use every day on Mandriva.

     John showed off the Dell Latitude which is one of the heavier
build machines which he got at an unreasonably low price from
San Mateo County.

     I showed off the LibreOffice which I had added to the Mandriva install
over the weekend.  It involves downloading 3 files, the executable install
file, the help file and a very small text file that informs you of exactly
the commands you need to use to install.  I copied them from the file
to my root shell to do the install and everything went smoothly.  I would
advise other users to migrate to this tool.

     Afterward I called up the MCC* from the root shell and cleaned out
my Open Office install as well as a bunch of other orphaned files.
LibreOffice was fully installed with all modules listed in the menus.
*MCC stands for Mandriva Control Center which lets you do lots of things 
with your installation of Mandriva including
setting up graphics, partitioning Disks and Media, managing user 
accounts, setting up vital peripherals like printers and scanners,
net-work connection and Installing and removing software.

     The Knoppix 6.7 disk has a utility for writing the disk to a 
medium.  Though the Disk shows 3.7 GiB a 4 GiB micro-SD card
was not large enough. so I used my SanDisk 8 GiB Cruzer and the install 
to this media did not take long.
This in in contrast to the attempt on the 4 GiB where it took forever 
and churned out a log file of what it could not install due
  to lack of space.  The Knoppix 6.7 included the LibreOffice so I got 
to look at it and was able with Knoppix to load my old OO
files from my home directory on the disk.  LO looks a bit less cluttered 
than the OO interface.   I was inspired by my look at the
LO to go ahead and change my word processor on my computer.

     Sadly we were not able to help John much with the Latitude.

     All in all we had a very good if small meeting.
     Sorry it took me so long to get the report in but I had a lot to do 
earlier this week.

     Bobbie Sellers