[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday 1 April, 2018

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

     Well I was pleasantly surprised by the turnout for the meeting today.

     I got the Cafe about 10:35 AM and setup my machine then got my usual
decaf soy latte and booted up my Dell E6510 without problems by 10:45 AM.

     11:00 AM Maestro came in.

     11:05 Ken and his wife showed up.

     11:12 Michael, our Slackware specialist showed up.

     11:20 Jack B showed up with her machine.

     12:05 PM Jim S. showed up bringing along Nels.

     12:10 Joseph P.(no, not that one but another one) came in.

     As soon as Jackie showed up Ken began to help her with the Ubuntu
on her Toshiba Satellite laptop.  He managed to fix most of her problems.

     Michael read the latest magazines and then consumed a Sunday paper.
But Michael also raised a question basically concerned with the Intel
built-in vulnerability called Spectre.  The question was "How does a program
read the data cache?"   Some discussion ensued and it was looked it up
online.   When I heard that the question was raised by the purported 
operation
of of "Spectre" I looked that up online.
<http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/intel-chip-problem-cpu-flaw-meltdown-spectre-vulnerability-patch-3365861>
and
<http://www.businessinsider.com/intel-chip-bug-meltdown-and-spectre-explained-2018-1>

     These Intel, AMD and ARM problems are things that can only be fixed so
far on Linux by using the latest kernels which prevent this problem from
arising but they do slow down our fast CPUs more than a bit. Microsoft of
course released a patch called "Kaiser" for Windows 10.  Kaiser slows down
the computer as well.
     I notice it on this machine, a Dell E6520 with an i5.   But I have 
three
browsers open, Thunderbird and several instances of editors and file
managers as a daily event.
     It will take years for the chip makers to fix this problem so in the
meantime we will just have to bear the slowdown.

     So before I got into the Spectre based discussion I made a copy of 
GPartEd
0.31-1-amd64  to use at home.  Then after that was done I booted up
Parrot-Studio-3.11-amd64 and was pleasantly surprised to find a very
capable full Linux distribution using Mate.  The only deficiencies I found
were an older version of LibreOffice and only one game, a version of chess.
It went right online with only the password entry required at Cafe Enchante.
Of course it does not have my favorite text editors but it probably can get
them.
      Today I had brought along copies of the whole Parrot 3.11 line which
includes i386 and amd64 in security releases, home releases and Studio
which is aimed at AV creators and users, except for the Studio i386 version.
I also brought along the fresh release of GPartEd in i686. i686(PAE) and 
amd64.

     Joseph P. borrowed the latest copy of Linux Pro and got a Knoppix 
8.1 Live
DVD.
     Nels got a copy of manjaro-kde-17.1.6-stable-x86_64 and a copy of
Parrot-security-3.11_amd64.recommended to him by another member
of the group.

     About 1 PM Jim took Nels home then returned to the Cafe to pickup
Joseph, Michael and myself and give rides toward our homes.

     Anyone attending the meeting is free to correct my omissions or
incomprehension of the activities and asked to do so asap so that the
membership not in attendance will not be mis-informed any longer
than necessary.

     The next meeting will be on Monday April 16, 2018.
     You can expect my notice of the next meeting up about April 9.

     Thanks for your attention.

     Bobbie Sellers























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