[sf-lug] Meeting of today Sunday 4 May 2014

[Bobbie Sellers]

         Jim gave me a ride to the meeting. John S. showed up as he
mentioned to show off "Just_Browsing" a distro for USB intended to be
used on strange x86 machines for just browsing and then, Zorin a Ubuntu
spin built on 12..04 'buntu.  Zorin is designed to make Windows users
comfortable.
     Jim tried out a DSL/Knoppix business card distro for recovery of
various sorts.  Fortunately nothing need recovery from his machine.
     David was interested in learning to use Python and we found him some
resources.
     Ken Schaeffer and his wife attended and Ken basically enjoyed the
geek companionship and the magazines.
     Linux Pro is late in showing on the news stands this month. If you
are into the Raspberry PI you should check out a good news stand like
Fog City News where I saw at least 3 magazine style publications directed
toward users and builders.
     Recently it was the 50th Anniversary of the BASIC programming
language which I learned on on the Usenet and read an article by David
Benn, author of ACE Basic Compiler for the AMIGA.
50th anniversary of the (Dartmouth) BASIC language...
<http://dbenn.wordpress.com/2014/05/04/basics-50th-early-micros-and-ace-
basic-for-the-amiga/>
<http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/>
     Online this lead to a burst of nostalgia for my days using the C=64
and Amiga which I will spare you all.
     At the meeting this had a similar effect and we learned that John S.
in his day published two BASIC programs and was paid for his excellent
work.
     Eric S.  showed up about 12:05 with the Ubuntu 14.04 disk in several
version i386, AMD64 and versions to run on x86 MacIntosh computers.

     Presently Eric and John are engaged in a lively discussion of
compatibility of hardware and Linux, and the problems for Windows XP
users.  Both Ken and Jim helped David with his quest for Python learning.

     1300 roughly we wrapped up the meeting and Jim drove myself and Eric
home.

     ---------resolution of my computer problems--------------------

     Now the last time I wrote to the list it was from the gmail interface
which as I mentioned I find difficult to work with.  I tried to get the
Compaq notebook working from Sunday night to Thursday afternoon. When I
got back here from errands,  I installed a 500 Gigabyte hard drive, 
installed
PC Linix OS 2014.04 and essentially my problems were over,  I was able 
to get
e-mail again.  Saturday I managed to configure Thunderbird so that I 
could get
back to the Usenet newsgroups.

     What happened on Sunday April 27 was that  a bunch of updates to 
the system
were made available and I installed them.  There does not seem to be a 
way to avoid certain
updates if you want to do that.  But there was more than one thing wrong 
because
when I switched to noveau, a FOSS nVidia driver, I still had other 
problems though
I was able to see my desktop again.  On Sunday when I first had the 
problem I
decided that I would replace the hard drive but first I tried to fix 
with formatting
and bad block checks on the partitions.  I tried the test from the BIOS 
for the
hard disk and it failed to tell me what I needed to know.

     I am going to try to use some of my vast DH space to set up a 
installation to test
the updates.before I do them on my working version of PCLOS.

     ==================================

     Back to Nostalgia who remembers "Running Fast and Light with 
minumum Overbyte"?

     Next meeting at Cafe Enchante will be on May 19th in the evening. 
Expect a regular
announcement later.

     Bobbie Sellers