[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting of Monday, 15 August 2016

[Bobbie Sellers]

On 08/15/2016 11:04 PM, Bobbie Sellers wrote:
>             SF-LUG meeting of August 15, 2016
>
>     Well I got to the Cafe Enchante by 5:50, did my setup and
> remembered this time to switch on the WiFi on the Dell
>  E6420  and it was online before I could get back to my
> seat from ordering my usual drink.
>   No other LUG members had appeared at 6:05 PM so
> I started to read the Distrowatch-Weekly newsletter
> when I noted that my clock was still displaying UTC
> instead of Pacific time.  I tried to fix that but no luck
> I think it might be locked in the BIOS.
>
>     Now this week the Distrowatch Weekly reviews
> the Zenwalk distribution.
>     Open Mandriva 3.0 is out in i589 and x86_64 versions
> that run very well, but the KDE's is still pushing an
> incomplete Plaxma 5 lacking certain amenities to
> which KDE's Plasma users like myself have become
> accustomed.  Certain handy widgets are missing and
> some are more limited in their function, and a
> significant plugin remains missing.  According to the
> Usenet sources Mageia 6RC has reached the quality
> assurance stage of testing.
>
>     6:15 PM Erik showed up with a new external drive with
> which he was having some problems and this provided
> lots of material for discussion.  he had tried to format
> a new external drive of 4 Terabytes (=3.64 Tebibytes).
> We discussed formatting the drive using GParted or similar
> tools.  Erik said the last formatting had taken overnight
> and wiped out the only partition setup on the disk.
> Discussed use of file managers principally Dolphin
> and Midnight commander as well.

     I neglected to mention that Aaron and Erik discussed
CLI tools for disk formatting and the use of man to discover
operation of those tools.   Myself when I look at man pages
I get confused and that is one of the reasons I prefer to
use GUI tools.
     We also discussed how that external hard disk should be
formatted.  Erik wants to have one very large partition.
Myself I prefer to have several smaller partitions for the
reason that if you have a problem the smaller partitions
can be recovered more quickly.

     As for the addendum above I remembered this stuff
as soon as I posted but was too tired last night to write
those few lines.  One of the reasons that I forgot on the
first attempt to write up the notes was that with the
continuous discussion it gave me little chance to make
notes.

> Eric left about 7:25 PM
>
>     6:20 PM Aaron came in bringing his $8 older tower
> computer hauling it on a shopping cart via public
> transport from the East Bay (as I understand).
> This older PC clone was sold as having several hundred
> Gigabytes of music and he was not disappointed,
> He found an Asus monitor to use as display,
>
>     It has Windows XP installed in a 50-60 Gigabyte
> partition and Aaron was de-fragmenting the partition
> and running cleanup on it trying to make room enough
> for a Linux partition.  Aaron had brought in some disks
> both loaned to him and a couple of blank cds.
>     After 7:30 PM  I began to pack-up.  Since Aaron
> was busy with the cheap computer I stuck around
> until 8:30 PM to keep him company but I began to
> get drowsy and recalled that I had medication
> to take at home so left and caught a #38 back to
> my neighborhood.
>
>     Well I hope that if I have made any grievous mis-statements
> of fact in the previous line that I will be corrected by the
> knowledgeable.
>
>     The next SF-LUG meeting will be on Sunday September 4
> and you should see my regular notice around August 29 on
> this mailing list.
     Bobbie Sellers