[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes from Sunday September 1, 2019

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

     Well on a Holiday weekend we got about twice the turnout I expected.

     I showed up about 10:35 am and setup at a vacant chair near the 
large table.
Two men seemed to be doing some work and reading across from each other,
but as the LUG attendees began to come in they decided that they might 
as well
leave.

     Now as I was returning from getting my decaf soy latte I noted a man in
an old Commodore tee shirt and asked him about that involvement. This
was a member who had not been able to attend the LUG meetings in
quite some time.  Recently he had left his position and decided to catch
up on the LUG but had been reading the mailing list.
     Len J. may be known to many older members of the groups.

     John S with his very high end laptop was next to show up. Nothing
could manage to fully boot on his machine and if I had been paying
closer attention I might have checked on what was happening.
     It is possible that I had put a Linux filesystem on the Flash Drives
I handed him and that this MS based machine was unable to read
them properly or that he had forgotten to setup the machine to
boot from insecure drives.

     Ken S.  showed up with his lovely wife Sunni now recovering from
her recent problems.   He spent some time talking to Ken and John
but we did not talk much.   Sunni actually spoke more to me than
Ken had time for.

     Michael who runs Slack-ware came in briefly to read the papers
and have a cup of coffee with friends and he was the first to leave
as his activity apparently has been much restricted lately.

     Ken was interested in my collection of Flash Drives and how I had
gotten the separators and so on.  He spent some time attempting
to determine what he had on his very large key-ring of Flash Drives.
Oh and he uses Qubes OS on a regular basis.  He was not much
interested in Easy OS 2.1

     I shared before the end of our meeting that a member, with
some assistance from me, bought a new Dell Inspiron notebook
with Ryzen 3,  a very nice machine for a reasonable price.
     On Sept. 26 I helped her install Ubuntu on that machine.
Now I had bought a copy of PartEdMagic for another installation
and on that Inspiron there were no problems in using it.  On this
machine though the PartEdMagic could not modify the Windows
volume at all.   So I had to start up MS's popular program launcher
and find the Disk management software and managed to cut the
amount of disk dedicated to that tool by nearly half.  I still feel
a bit dirty from having trafficked with MS even by so much.
     Also I noted with some delight as I went into the BIOS/Firmware
that I could turn off Secure Boot without turning off UEFI so possibly
there is a way to turn off the Windows volume protection.  After
I had made room we installed Ubuntu(her choice) on this notebook.
I hope the information may be of use to other users.

     About 20 minutes to 1 PM Ken and Sunni took off followed by John S.
Ken left a few minutes before 1 PM  as I was still packing my bag.

     Jim Stockford stopped by to tell us that he was too ill to attend and
i must say he looked unwell.

     At the last meeting on 19th August, Jim Stockford announced that he
could no longer support the Monday Evening meetings.   This has
not been discussed at all on this mailing list.
     I think that it should be discussed as this changes a long time
tradition of SF-LUG

     Until it is discussed the next meeting will be on September 16th
and I hope to announce it on the 9th or 10th of this month with
some more hints as to what will be on hand.

     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.

     Bobbie Sellers