[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes for Sunday June 2, 2019

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

     Well it was a small but pleasant meeting.

     I was a bit later than usual but by 10:45 I had set up
pretty well as can be seen from the photo, thanks to
John S.  We had the large table and pretty much filled it
up.
     So John S. and Maestro were the next to show up.
     Ken and his wife Sunni came in.

     I had a few chores to finish on the Dell E6520 as I had replaced
the SSD drive of 120 GB with a 500 GB hard drive with a fresh install
of PCLinuxOS 64.

     I dug out all the later Flash Drives with MX Linux 18.2,
<https://mxlinux.org/manuals/> and <https://mxlinux.org/wiki/helpfiles/>,
robolinux64-xfce-v10.5 which resisted booting on John S.'s late model Asus,
but did well on my Dell.   RoboLinux has some special tools to create
Virtual Machines from various versions of Windows, precisely XP, 7 and
10.  Vista and 8.1 were inexplicably left out.   One can only imagine
why.   I may add this as an install for the 6520.
     kali-linux-light-2019.2-amd64.iso and kali-linux-2019.2-amd64.iso
also booted up nicely on the Dell.
  Parrot-kde-security-4.6_amd64.iso and Parrot-kde-home-4.6_amd64.iso
look very respectable.

     John got a copy of his PCLinuxOS64 2019.05 now with update 
notification.
Of course this is a neat little tool that offers you when you respond a 
chance
to view the updates, do the updates or leave them for later.   If you decide
to do the updates you are offered the choice of either doing them via 
apt-get
or Synaptic.   If you chose apt-get then a small terminal window is opened
and apt-get runs in it.  I had 92 regular updates and it took 10 minutes to
finish.
     If you open in Synaptic it already knows about the updates and you can
proceed as usual with that useful graphic tool.

     Now John wanted a demonstration of Synaptic and I gave it downloading
and installing an extra kernel.  The sequence goes startup Synaptic with 
root
password required, then when it has finished loading, Reload to get the 
latest
list of packages that you will be needing to correct functional or 
security issues
missed in the previous releases of those packages.   Then you can search for
new kernels by using the search window, just typing in "kernel" without the
quotation marks, using the "Look  in:" to "name", hit "search" and find 
a list
of installed and available kernels.   PCLinuxOS keeps us up to date if we
need that, and also has 2 Long Term Support kernels.   Presently I booted
up using Linux kernel 5.1.6.   And while you can keep as many kernels as you
have space for, I keep only 3 available for booting on GRUB2.   One is the
latest kernel which I try out before I recommend it to the people I assist
with such matters.  After the "Zombieland" re-coding I was testing 6 new
and updated kernels a week and that takes time.  Understand when
I say testing, I am referring to checking simple stuff like the ability 
to boot,
logins, the interfaces to my common tools work.  I have reported one 
previous
  problem and the next version of the kernel corrected that. Synaptic can
also be used to remove old kernels.

      Synaptic is very useful if not for the routine updating for 
finding packages
you might want to use such as Red Shift which is in two packages, one for
the actual tool and one for the gui to use it easily.   This turns down the
blue in the screen as the day light outside wanes and makes the screen
warmer.   I am finding it a lot easier to get myself to leave the 
computer and
get to rest since I started using Red Shift.

     No one seemed interested in the latest milestone version 1.0.0-1 of 
GPartEd.
I have several copied on CDs in versions for i686, i686-pae, and amd64.

     Ken was assisting another user with a sound problem in which the 
speakers
were cutting out.  I came up with one of my stupid practical suggestions 
which
would have involved opening the laptop but Ken figured out shortly that 
it was
a software problem and it was fixed before the end of the meeting.
     Bravo Ken.  Hi Sunni!

     About 12:45 I started packing up and everyone got away before me.
At Geary and 25th we enjoyed a squishy marine layer.
     In case you wondered Jim Stockford was away this weekend.

     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 will be on Monday May 17, 2019 from 6-8 PM.
Usual notice will be posted on or about May 13.

     Bobbie Sellers





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