SF-LUG - Meeting Next Sunday January 4, 2015

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGgers,

   SF-LUG meets every first Sunday from 11 A.M. to 1 P.M.
and 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 7 members.   If you have a problem come along
and maybe we can help but if not we can usually find someone
who can.

     Meeting times are nominal so that if you show up too late
we may have left.

     I have obtained Kubuntu 15.04 Alpha Vivid Vervet and it works
well, booting up in Live Mode to KDE 5.x  The task bar is white
and the background is pastel tile in a triangular format. The
use of the next release of KDE was the main point of interest
to me.  KDE 5 seems more solid than the early KDE 4.x releases
which were pretty much shoved down the users' throats, i.e. if
you wanted the other updates then you had to use the new version
of KDE.
	The 1.2 Gigabyte iso file includes lots of good software
but not everything that I prefer.

	As well I was able to get the latest WiFiSlax 4.10 which
is full of tools all having to do with WiFi and finding out how
to use them would be an education in networking in itself.
	As indicated by the name it uses Slaxware repositories
but can use others from what I can figure out.  One thing is that
this is a Spanish release and while parts of that can be changed
to English perhaps more easily on a hard disk install with the
live mode it is less accommodating.  The iso file is 795 Megabytes
so it has to go on a DVD and be read by a DVD drive.

	==================================	
	
	Just before Christmas PCLOS released a full set of updates
calling it 2014.12 in all the formats and architectures it supports.
So if users have kept up with the updates then they have no use
to install this except as an easier starting point if they have
a problem with the current install.
	Better than that they promise the next release sometime
in 2015 will have a lot of stuff that were previously rejected
by developers of PCLOS."Future releases will default to GRUB2
and support UEFI and GPT partition formats."to quote from the
release announcement.
	I have the iso files for each version of KDE live/install
disks/or Flash Drives.   I will say that I had a failure on my
attempt to make a bootable update drive from the iso in live
mode but had no trouble finding the iso files in my Downloads
directory.  I will be making a couple of DVDs for 32 bit and
64 bit KDE versions.  If you want an alternative desktop
environment such as Mate or LXDE let me know and I will try to
get a copy for you.

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

	Finally I got a copy of Rosa, a Russian fork of Mandriva.
	I have't had time to sort it out yet,

	Hope to see you at the meeting.

	Bobbie Sellers