[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday March 3, 2019

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,
      It was a watery day on Geary Blvd. but warm and dry inside the
Cafe Enchante.

     10:40 AM I arrived at the Cafe Enchante and John S. had preceded
me and had 20 keyboards for the Noisebridge gang in his car as well
as a small tower.
     As I was setting up,  John S. was kind enough to get my beverage
for me.
      During the course of the meeting John tried out several distributions
including the EasyOS 1.08, Beta 2 of Mageia 7, and perhaps DarkStar's
compilation of PCLOS64 KDE-5 of 2019.03
     There were problems with each due to failure of the system
to automatically adjust to the 4K Display on his advanced laptop.
I was able to manipulate the Mageia to get a more readable display
using the KDE Settings font manager to adjust the size of typeface.
But this was very difficult due to the pre-configured font size and
there were still problems that might be solved by the installation
process. Otherwise resorting to the KDE Settings at some length
may help with some problems.   And most distros have similar
tools to adjust various settings to make the software usable on
a very high definition screen.

     Joseph P. showed up and at one point was engaged with Rick Moen,
for a considerable portion of the meeting, discussing alternatives to
his present computer hardware situation and the use of Linux to
replace MacOS on an older PPC powered machine.

     Maestro came in and finished reading the magazine he had borrowed.

     Rich Moen arrived with his portable hard drive full of iso files and he
let me do some significant copying of iso files, mainly of Debian 
alternative
isos with some lighter weight Desktop Managers to my portable drive.
     As Rick pointed out in his email to me and to the list, sometimes the
basic iso files from Debian lack drivers.  So this means that we now
have a lot more Debian live distributions with a variety of DM including
KDE.  These alternatives might be more useful for new users

     As for myself I did some updates on the Dell E6520 with the 128 GB SSD
drive dual-booting Windows 7 and PCLinuxOS64 before anyone but John S.
had arrived.  The SSD drive made this much quicker than I expected.
     I tested the Mageia, and  the PCLinux from Darkstar.
     Mageia was very nice on my 1366 x 768 display but it shoved some tools
out of sight and others seemed to be lacking but of course if you need them
they can be downloaded via the RPM-drak in the Mageia Computer Configuration
tool.
     Darkstar's PCLinux compilation was up to date in many ways but it 
lacked
a great many tools I use routinely.    Downloading them to a Darkstar
installation via Synaptic would be taking a lot of time so I had better 
back up
my PCLinux installation or remaster an iso file from it.
     I had tried out Easy OS 1.08 at home earlier and done a lot of 
reading about
the system online at www.easyos.org

     12 Noon Jim Stockford arrived to eat something and to get the USB
Keyboards from John S. and he took away the mini-tower as well.  It was
very good to see Jim back at the meetings.

     About 12:45 pm I started to pack up my bag.

     Jim gave me and another member a ride back to my neighborhood.

     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 March 18,  2019 from 6-8 PM.
     Regular notice should be up on March 11 on this mailing list.

     Bobbie Sellers