SF-LUG - meeting of Sunday January 4, 2015

[Bobbie Sellers]

	A bit of a late start for me today.

	John Strazzaino showed up before me and had his Raspberry Pi running.
	I arrived about 1050 or a little later.
	Michael Paoli showed up next,
	Then Alex Kleider and Mike  Rojas
	Somewhat later than usual Ken Schaeffer and his wife.
	Finally around 1200 Jim Stockbridge.

	So the Raspberry Pi is very impressive.  A box with CPU and
memory about the size of a king-sized cigarette box or a traveling
soap dish for those who have forgotten the king-sized box.  John
seemed to have Tetris clone running when I got there.
	John Strazzaino also brought a couple of Dell compact towers
or desktops hardly heavier than my notebook.  He left them in the
trunk of his car. John and I moved them to Jim's cargo area.
	And he was kind enough to buy my decaf soy latte!

	Alex K. bought in his Raspberry Pi configured as an access
point.   That is interesting to see.

	Michael P. bought in his laptop and a lot of distribution
disks.
	Mike Rojas returned my copy of last month's Linux Pro
magazine with a couple of distribution disks I had loaned him
to try out.  He believes he encounter problems due to the age
of the machine he was trying out.

	I made a fresh copy of Knoppix 7.4.2 for Mike R, as no one
should be without this versatile tool.

	I loaded and played with the Kubuntu 5 alpha beta which
comes with KDE version 5 which looks better than it is so far.
I was able to quickly configure the Dolphin file browser to the
presentation I prefer but the digital clock is not too helpful though
the numbers of the hours and the date are better balanced in size
than the current digital clock.  But like KDE version 4.x a few
years back you cannot copy the time from the clock.  I imagine this
will be fixed soon enough.
	Anyway the reason I went to the trouble of downloading the
iso file on Kubuntu was because of the chance of looking at KDE 5.
I also got the Magiea 5 beta and sadly it simply seems unable to
boot on my machine.  This was the status last year with Mageia 4 but
it was fixed by Mageia 4.1.  I have reported this problem but seen no
later release.

	My old copy of Levanta business card CD-ROM with Damned
Small Linux failed to boot.  It has been a decade since I last
tried it out,  It complained of there not being a Knoppix file system
though why that would be important is not clear.  It left me with
a very limited terminal.  This is likely due to the lack of graphic
support for modern equipment on the old distribution

	Mike R. was busy looking at most of the other attendees'
computers and chatting.  He is in technical support it seems.
	Ken and Alex spent a good deal of time chatting.
Ken was running Ubuntu on his Asus from a USB 3.0 flash drive which
was very busy.  It has a bright light on the ourside edge of the
drive which flashes brightly and frequently on access.

	The main part of the meeting broke up about 1 PM.  Jim
and I went after the cpu boxes then returned to Cafe Enchante where
Jim principally chatted with Alex K.
	Michael P. had the usual distribution disks to offer and
Mike R. spent a lot of time chatting with him.

	And finally I had no real time to mention it at the meeting
but PC Linux OS promises work on what amount to problem areas
before it releases 2015.xx in the area of GPT and of UEFI
installations.  They have plenty of good examples to study
before they commit to changes.  Mageia 5.x promises greater
ease of installation as well in the same areas.
	Jim gave me a ride home.

	Next meeting will be on Monday January 19, 2015 and the
regular announcement will be out on the 12th or 13th of the month.

	I  will be grateful for any corrections or emendations to
these rough notes.