[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday, December 2, 2018

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

     Well I got to the Cafe Enchante today about 10:35 am
and it was packed.  For the first time in some months I
was not able to use the larger table.  I settled at one of
the smaller square tables and got my drink.  Then I started
to set up.

     John S.  Showed up with his hot new laptop. and took a
round table next to me.  He was trying out several distributions
but for some reason the laptop seemed  unhappy with
booting from the Flash Drives I provided.

     Next in was Ken and his wife.  We started to pull more square
tables together to accommodate the growing crowd of members.

     Then a young fellow who wishes for his name not to be mentioned
so let me dub him "Qubes Guru" or QG.  He helped me advance along
that path.
      Joseph P. showed up and returned the magazine he had borrowed.
He put some time in reading the latest magazine.

     Around Noon Tom came in and started working with his laptop as he
has no facility to download updates and so forth at his home.   He
borrowed two Linux Pro magazines issues, #216 and 214.

     About 12:18 Victor came back for the first time in a long time. He
had been in Seattle tending to unfortunate family problems.

     About 12:25 Jim S. showed up.

     I demonstrated Qubes as I learned the proper  way to do the
updates on the Qubes and on the Virtual Machines Debian and Fedora 29,
which is also the basic machine running under the Xen Hypervisor as I
have been given to understand.    This was with the constant advice of
the Qubes Guru.

     I won't go into the details but you use a terminal window to issue
the update  commands and it is different for each example of a VM.
You use the template of a VM to update then when updates are done
you shut down the machine and used the Qubes Manager/Applications
windows to move the tools you want into the Virtual Machines so that
you can start up a fresh one.
     To the Fedora 29 I updated then added Kate, LibreOffice Base and
Writer. and finally KWrite.

     Now as I was saying earlier the Cubes has to be very secure with
an encrypted disk and Whonix to use with TOR.  It may be a bit early for
anyone but the people very concerned with security for whatever reason
to adopt this excellent tool.
     But if you need more security and have no problems with using
terminal interfaces to do the updates then you should be interested.
The big deal is that programs that do not play well together are isolated
from each other so that the system does not corrupt so easily as it does
  in a regular failure.

     From the afternoon's use it became clear that an SSD is a better medium
that rust (regular HD) for the Qubes and so are faster processors, 
better (more cores)
Processors and hopefullly eventually Meltdown and Spectre-proofed microcode.
A lot of memory about 16 GiB of ram is advisable as well, though the Guru
advises 12 GiB.

     Now curiously enough Victor is mostly using Windows 10 but though 
an Oracle
Virtual Machine x86 is running a couple of Linux distributions, one of 
which was
Lubuntu.
     This is a very similar system to the Qubes but aimed in a somewhat 
different
direction.  It chooses the system to be run in a somewhat simpler manner 
than
Cubes with a somewhat different intent it seems.  It also seemed to load 
the
distributions it uses somewhat faster.
           Read and compare the following: 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubes_OS>
and <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_VM_Server_for_x86>
     Then do a little search on hypervisor and come up wth KVM
which is now a Red Hat intellectual property.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel-based_Virtual_Machine>
     Which is doubtlessly why the Atomic and various VMs that
Red Hat pushes are doing so well.

     Nearly forgot that I had along Voyager 18.10 to show off the latest 
version
of Gnome Shell.  It does seem improved but not by much.  Still the 
application
can be shown by categories using icons but not a menu with the name clear
on the screen.  Note that KDE Plasma5 can present in 2 forms of menu and in
a window full of icons if that is to your taste.

     While writing this I learned the correct spelling of Xen, no, no, 
not Zen,
though that is how it is pronounced and hypervisor which I added to
my local dictionaries.

     1 PM was the time almost before we knew it.  Such fun.
     I packed up and Victor gave me a ride to my front door.

     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.

     Next meeting is Monday 17 December 2018 which will be the
last meeting for 2018.  Expect my regular notice to show up on
Monday the 10th of December.

     Don't forget on the 6th of December to give a thought to
the ancient saint and pagan god, Nicholas.  He is a patron
of the poor and outsiders in society.  Look for better references
to his myth than provided in the Catholic sites.

     Happy Holidaze!

     Bobbie Sellers