[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday August 5, 2018

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

      Well I got to the Cafe Enchante about 10:30 am and setup my
Dell E6420 but it failed to boot.  I spent a lot of the next two and
a half hours attempting to figure out what was wrong.
      Now the machine had been running well on Thursday when I
did the updates last.  It did report low memory so I took it off
the AC line, pulled the battery, and the hard drive.  Replaced the
memory sodimms and the hard drive, the battery and booted
up again and everything seemed to work ok after I used the
BIOS to record the new memory.
      All of my tests today failed to find the internal hard drive,
      I tried to fix the problem at the meeting in the last 45
minutes but ran into a problem with being unable to see
the internal SATA connector due to poor lighting.

      So around 11:00 am Maestro showed up.  I don't understand
what problem he may have asked Ken about.

      11:05 am Jackie B. showed up with her problematic Ubuntu
installation,  she was looking for some help with a couple of
problems at least.
      One of the problems is that the SFPL seems to insist on
on non-Linux programs to check out and read e-books.  Ken
   is reported to have fixed this somehow and he may publish
something about that.

      Ken S. and his wife showed up about 11:07 and he spent a lot
of the time trying to solve Jackie's problems.

      Tom came in about 11:25 and asked some advice from Ken.
Late in the meeting he asked for a copy of Ubuntu 18.04.1 which
I fortunately had made earlier.

      Robert came in about 11:30 he was having a problem with installing
his printer under Ubuntu 18.04.1.  When Ken had a moment he asked
Ken some questions then left about Noon.

      Jim S. came in about 11:55 and enjoyed some drink and conversation
with Mike,  our Slackware expert who showed up about Noon.

      12:30 pm I finished my attempts to fix the Dell at the meeting
and began to pack up my bag


          1 PM Ken S. and wife left.

          ~1:15 PM Jim gave me a ride home dropping off Mike to do some 
shopping on the way.

      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.
      At home:
So I put the hard drive in the Dell and one screw to hold it for travel.
At home I got my little head lamp out and pulled the battery ,was able\
to see the connector for the SATA dnve and carefully slid it into
place, put the battery back in and was able to boot right up.
Then I did some updates and when I got back to the Dell
the screen would not work properly.  Wheeey!
Since then I have managed to boot one time but finding lots
of bad graphics displays.

      The next meeting will be on Monday, August 20, 2018 at the
Cafe Enchante from 6-8 PM.  Hopefully I will be able bring along a
computer for demonstrations.

      Bobbie Sellers