[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting of Sunday 2 April, 2017

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

     Well attendance was not the greatest but I think it was a very
good meeting.

     Due to a slight personal accident i arrived a bit later than usual
at ~10:55.  A student or scholar occupied the large table to I grabbed
two smaller tables and pulled them together, unpacked my bag and
set up my Dell.
     I had no real problems setting up.

     John S. was the first to show up and I let him try out the Linux
Lite (LL) on his machine but John was not enthralled, much the same result
for Linux Mint Debian Edition 2(LMDE2), Manjaro 17.0 and Fat Dog.

     I had installed LL on the Dell and tried it out at some length but was
not impressed.  I had better luck with the LMDE2 and concluded it got
4 stars of 5 from me.  I could use it in a pinch if the PCLOS gang went
out of business, though it has shortfalls from KDE Plasma 4.  By the time
I finished playing with it it was 10 minutes to 1 PM and so I simply 
shut it down and packed up all the disks and stuff I brought with me.

     Maestro showed up shortly after John S.  and assisted me with
CLI advice enabling me to determine that both these distros use
systemd and assisted me in configuration of the WiFi connection.

     Around Noon Ken Schaffer and his charming wife showed up.
Ken spent quite some time chatting with Maestro but not certain of
the topic

     Aaron came in about 12:15 with his large Notebook for sale, as noted
in the mailing list.

     John S. has a nice Dell Optiplex compact desktop computer with
a Dell monitor for sale as well.  Very reasonable prices.

     Jim Stockford showed up a few minutes later eager for lunch.

     I briefly expiated on "gdisk" which is "fdisk" with extensions to
deal with the GPT aka Globally Unique Identification Partition Table
scheme which permits up to 128 primary partitions on a disk.  Then I
talked very briefly about the need to create a "Boot-BIOS" partition if 
you want to convert an old MBR system to GPT and which must when
partitioning be given a special GUID number in order for it to be
recognized and work.

     Some people wondered why I would want the capability but on
the Dell so far I have about 15 partitions 4 for booting, 4 for PCLOS
as well as Swap, a Data partition to provide testing material, and
two partitions each for OS that I install to the disk.  All are primary
partitions.
     I used gdisk because all sorts of OS could not understand my
former mixed partitioning scheme.  I find too that mixed systems
are less stable both from my reading and from my experience.

     Other users may not need this sort of setup but for those who
do need it research the topic of conversion of the disk using "gdisk"
and the BIOS-Boot partition and the magic number can be found on
Wikipedia.  You need to back up vital information before you do
this as conversion destroys the original partitions which was one
reason that I did this.  Then the tiny boot partitions necessary for
booting must be recreated and that Magic Number written to the
<1 megabyte BIOS-Boot partition.  Try this URL for more information.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table>

     John S. shared that he has a new grandchild, his girlfriend
is promoted to Fiance and he needs to sell excess computers and
other material before he moves in with his Fiance.  Could not
happen to a nicer guy.

     Well Jim gave me a ride home.

     The next meeting at the Cafe Enchante will be on Monday
April 17, 2017 and if I am able I will give you at least a weeks
notice.  I hope that one or two of the lent magazines will be
returned at that time.

     As always I solicit the attending members to provide any
corrections and additions to my report.

     Thanks for reading,

     Bobbie Sellers aka bliss "running fast and light" on 
PCLinuxOS64-2016.03 GNU/Linux 4.10.8-pclos1 #1 SMP Fri Mar 31

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