[sf-lug] SF-LUG meeting notes

[Bobbie Sellers]

Hi LUGers,

      10:25 AM arrived at the Cafe Enchante & caught the big table.

      No problem with the setup.  Did updates for the last 24 hours on 
my Dell
E6520 on both the PCLinuxOS64 and Mageia 7.1.

      John S. showed up next with a nice used Dell 6420 laptop to try out
several new versions of distros.  That laptop is for sale for $120 for 
members
and $150 for non-member or whatever he can get for it.

      11:05 Ken and Sunni Shaffer showed up next.  Then Jim Stockford
followed them in and they spent a good deal of the next 2 hours with Ken's
very nice Intel Stick computer with the nice little monitor as Jim learned
about setting up the Stick computer.

      Aaron showed up with his 32 bit Dell laptop.

      John tried out the new PCLinuxOS64 Mega 2018.112 with Plasma 5.  
This is
a version with light compression so that it boots very quickly despite 
the fact
that it is  3.2 GB. It has a great number of programs some of which are of
course  unnecessary for most uses but they are up-to-date.  The kernel 
is 5.4.5
only one step behind the rolling release kernel of 5.4.6.

      John tried out the Nomad BSD but had problems with it.  I had only 
gotten
to the Unix shell prompt at home. But todayI got past the prompt and 
ended up
with a lovely sandy landscape as background but no menu and no icons so far.
I hope to have enough time to try it out further this month.
      The lovely Nomad BSD installs on the first boot to the USB drive 
it was
loaded from, you have to figure out the keyboard to assign, the time 
zone, and
have the help of multiple menus then you have to set a password. And if you
want to encrypt the /home it creates on the USB you will need a password 
there
too.
      I coached John with WiFi connections to the Cafe Enchante guest 
account

      AntiX-19.1 is also a quick booter and i even managed to get the WiFi
working.  Maybe some background changes but it is fast and light. The menus
open to the folder full of icons.

      Alpine Linux was install only and maybe I can try it out later in 
January
but it is not so easily configured.  It starts up in a root shell.

     The latest version of Emmabuntus on John's E6420 gave him some problems
getting on line but it was easily rectified as the network tools were 
the same
as on the PCLinuxOS64 Mega but no so easily located.  Emmabuntus uses a
Cairo-like Dock and some of the icons open into folder full of tools.

     At one point a friend of Aaron's visited us and had questions about 
the use of
certain network matters and Jim answered his questions thoroughly.

     About 1245 Ken and Sunni took off and the rest of us started to 
pack up.

     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 at the Cafe Enchante will be Sunday February 2, 2020.

     Bobbie Sellers