[sf-lug] SF-LUG meets July 16th ...

[Bobbie Sellers]

     SF-LUG meets every third Monday from 6 P.M. to 8 P.M.
at the Cafe Enchante, 26th and Geary Boulevard.

     These meetings are usually lightly attended with a high for the
year so far of 6 members.   If you have a problem come along
and maybe we can help but if not we can usually find someone
who can.

     Meeting of July 1
     Well the last meeting ended up as an attempt to diagnose
and fix my Presario.  The multiple installs and chain-loading were
all messed up.  Daniel and Ken Schaeffer helped me figure
out what had gone wrong and it was mostly that the fixed
disk had been partitioned beyond the capacity of the MBR to
keep track of what was going on.  Eric showed up as well
and was of some assistance.

     Since then I have gotten the 2010.2 re-installed and it
seems to be running fine.   I used Knoppix and thought
I had backed up everything using a copy command but a
lot of stuff like address books, mail and mail archives did
not come through.
     I had to use a separate booting CD disk tool to reformat the
whole disk and begin to repartition it.  (The partition editor on
the Knoppix DVD refused to even deal with such a mess.)

     I would be in a better position if I had just backed up
my Home partition before I started instead of relying
on copying to the backup disk to accomplish what I needed.
     One benefit of all the problems I have had is that i
am getting very good at dealing with installation of
the distribution i use.

     It will be a while until I try anything like this again though
since it was exhausting to deal with this stuff for over a week
of attempting various configurations.  The 2011 disk has
a bad driver for the Presario's nVidia card and I did not hear
of this matter until after attempting to get it to work with
the bad driver for about 3 days.  Sooner or later I will try
again to install it but the version of the Kernel 3.1.4 does
not seem happy with my setup.
     The Mandriva 2012 Tech Preview disk worked pretty well
but a few tools like the Mandriva Control Center seemed
to disappear.  2012 itself so far looks like it should be
a winner.
     2010.3 is a non-Mandriva update produced by MIB
and available thru repositories at the PlanetaLinux
site and I never managed to get a working installation.
I think it may have been a late-appearing April Fools
joke but maybe my hardware configuration is too
different from the people who assembled the bits
and pieces.

     Hope I see you all at the meeting next Monday.

     Bobbie