[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday May 5, 2019

Sun May 5 21:03:33 PDT 2019

Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> wrote at [1]
> Around Noon Jim Stockford came in with two boxes of books previously
> mentioned in the mailing list.  Several attendees picked up various 
> items. I grabbed a volume on Scribus...
...
> 12:30 Aaron showed up and started to set up.

Yep, got there even later than I predicted in [2], presumably due to all 
those crowds driving up-and-down Geary Blvd looking for parking and 
visiting Geary and Clement St shops & restaurants. Not to rant _too_ much 
about the traffic and crowds, but I can't recollect that it's ever taken 
me over 3/4 of an hour to get from Montgomery and Market St to Geary and 
26th Ave riding on the Muni 38R "express"(?) bus line :-\

Thanks to Alex K and to Jim S , I was successfully able to pickup three of 
the four preferred titles that I specified at [3] as well as the excellent 
pair of Brian W. Kernighan & Rob Pike titles.  Was also able to 
successfully carry back all these books "_afterwards_" (;-]) thanks to a 
ride from John S.  John S also grabbed the title _Linksys WRT54G_, by Paul 
Asadoorian & Larry Pesce (2007); also an excellent title by the sound of 
it.  FWIW, I mentioned to at least John S at the meeting that there was 
another good book I read on Linux Security besides James Turnbull's 
_Hardening Linux_ -- this one by an Aron Hsiao back in 2001 entitled _Sams 
Teach Yourself Linux Security Basics in 24 Hours_ [4].

Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> also wrote at [1]:
> Aaron brought along a lot of Flash Drives and donated 3 USB 2.0 FDs
> to the LUG via me to make fresh installs of NomadBSD and Knoppix.
> He is going to try to set up a 32 bit Nomad BSD on his older machine.

FWIW, those donated 3 USB 2.0 FDs are slightly used and are subjectively 
sluggish in reading and writing data.  The 3 USB 2.0 FDs _are_ 16GB in 
capacity, though, so these FDs may just have sufficient capacity for the 
system unpacking to over 7 GB for that installation of NomadBSD and then 
leaving plenty of extra space for /home (as Bobbie S wrote following the 
section of [5] starting "*But how about a Unix on a Stick.*")

As an aside related to NomadBSD (for those interested in such asides), the 
name "Nomad" reminds me of the destructive robot/probe of the selfsame 
name in the original StarTrek episode "The Changeling" over 51 1/2 years 
ago [6].  I am still able to remember Captain James Kirk's usage of a 
potent variant of the classic Epimenides Paradox [7] to cause "Nomad" to 
self-destruct in that episode's ending scene.

And yet again, Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> wrote at 
[1]:
> One member in particular is very happy with MX Linux & you can get
> the manual at <https://mxlinux.org/manuals/> and it is a nice
> distribution with XFCE version 4.+.+
> This is based on work done previously on Mepis and AntiX.  It is 
> mid-weight as opposed to a light-weight like Puppy or its
> derivatives, or a heavy-weight like Mageia or Ubuntu Studio,
> Knoppix, or Fedora Astronomy. This can be setup as a USB for either
> 32 or 64 bit kernels or both with a persistent partition for changes. 
> <https://mxlinux.org/wiki/system/create-a-live-usb-w-persist-from-a-windows-desktop/> 
> Even though it says "windows desktop" it appear that the procedure can 
> be easily adapted to Linux and I will be trying to produce a prototype
> on one of the donated FDs.

While it's great that the one member in particular is happy with the 
popular MX Linux, I myself have these two main concerns with MX Linux:
a. MX Linux's gparted formatting tool seems to find and leave gaps in hard 
drive partitions that were previously formatted very tightly -- without 
these gaps -- using other distros' formatting tools; tools such as fdisk 
and gparted.  Do not have an example at the moment to clearly show this 
discrepancy.
b. The available and initial installation of MX Linux does _not_ allow 
creating a single /boot partition for itself and/or for any other distro 
or distros pre-existing or to follow.  Instead, whenever I've installed MX 
Linux, the install only allows a maximum of three partitions for its 
installation.... /<root>, a swap partition, and /home.

For my own best use-case scenario with MX Linux, I've gone ahead and let 
MX Linux create all three of the above maximum number of partitions on the 
dedicated hard drive(s) where MX Linux is to be installed, and have made a 
larger-than-usual /home partition for use of many multiple VirtualBox 
machines (along the lines of drive persistence I put forward in [8], but 
non-portable.)  MX Linux thus becomes for this purpose the _only_ distro 
installed on a hard drive, in order to primarily serve as a VirtualBox 
Virtual Machine Manager host for a large number of VBox VM guests.  IMHO, 
a nice extra benefit from using just MX Linux here is that the default 
host install remains systemd-free while VBox guest machines can be 
systemd-dependent or not, depending on the init systems and intertwining 
systemd dependencies of each particular guest VM.

-A

=================================
References
=================================
[1]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q2/014078.html
[2]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q2/014077.html
[3]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q2/014051.html
[4]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0672320916/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2
[5]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q2/014058.html
[6]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Changeling_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series)
[7]https://www.gotquestions.org/Epimenides-Paradox.html
[8]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q2/014066.html
=================================

aaronco36 at sdf.org
--------------------------