We were once again able to return to one of our favourite venues for our pre-Christmas 2004 meeting.
Sheffield Hallam University very kindly helped us to use room 7328 over in the Stoddart building. A great place for a LUG meeting.
About twelve people came along to get some help and advice and to discuss some of the latest issues that are to do with Free and Open Source software. First in was Fuad Saeed who brought in a personal computer with a blank hard disk. We decided to try SuSE 9.2 on it. Sadly this release of the SuSE software under the direction of Novell has proven to be almost unusable on some hardware. Crowds of people have been seen moving away from SuSE to the Debian distribution or something else. I myself became one of the casualties of this fashion. Fuad's hardware took to this release of the SuSE software really well. Next in was Matthieu Doncoeur who is a French exchange student from just outside Lyon in Southern France. Matthieu is studying computing technology at SHU in his third year. He wanted some help with the installation of Mandrake 10.1 into his Acer laptop. Turns out he's a really friendly fella who has a wry sense of humour
and a shared love of the GNU/Linux software that all of us like to use on our
desktops every day of the week. We were immediately able to
understand him and we quickly helped him to understand the French
version of Mandrake Linux so that he could partition his hard disk and
delete "Bill's software" as he called it.
Chris Johnson finally arrived to install his new mail server that he has been trying to sort out for some months now. His particular saga started when he found that his machine wouldn't boot after a botched SuSE 9.1 installation. Some careful thought showed that this was the classical SuSE kernel bug which has been around since about SuSE 7.0. We proceeded to install SuSE 9.2. This time around YaST did what it usually does and failed to install most of the much needed libraries. Much throwing of arms in the air and some grunting noises resulted in
Matthieu's Mandrake 10.1 CDs being borrowed for an hour or two. The end result was a Mandrake machine which should make a good mail server when configuration is finished off. Although, for all we know Chris's saga may just finish off all of us and not just him. Many thanks to SuSE and Novell for providing us with some hilariously funny winter months.
The above was combined with some useful chat about software patents and what's happening with Gnome and KDE and the latest releases of the hundreds of versions of Linux that are out there just now. The words "Ubuntu Linux" seem to be getting around just now as is much chat about the 3.6 release of Knoppix.
We look forward to our next meeting which is due to take place on the
5th of February at the same venue. Have a happy and
prosperous new year. We do hope that you can come along in
February and join in with the rest of us.
About twelve people came along to get some help and advice and to discuss some of the latest issues that are to do with Free and Open Source software. First in was Fuad Saeed who brought in a personal computer with a blank hard disk. We decided to try SuSE 9.2 on it. Sadly this release of the SuSE software under the direction of Novell has proven to be almost unusable on some hardware. Crowds of people have been seen moving away from SuSE to the Debian distribution or something else. I myself became one of the casualties of this fashion. Fuad's hardware took to this release of the SuSE software really well. Next in was Matthieu Doncoeur who is a French exchange student from just outside Lyon in Southern France. Matthieu is studying computing technology at SHU in his third year. He wanted some help with the installation of Mandrake 10.1 into his Acer laptop. Turns out he's a really friendly fella who has a wry sense of humour
and a shared love of the GNU/Linux software that all of us like to use on our
desktops every day of the week. We were immediately able to
understand him and we quickly helped him to understand the French
version of Mandrake Linux so that he could partition his hard disk and
delete "Bill's software" as he called it.Chris Johnson finally arrived to install his new mail server that he has been trying to sort out for some months now. His particular saga started when he found that his machine wouldn't boot after a botched SuSE 9.1 installation. Some careful thought showed that this was the classical SuSE kernel bug which has been around since about SuSE 7.0. We proceeded to install SuSE 9.2. This time around YaST did what it usually does and failed to install most of the much needed libraries. Much throwing of arms in the air and some grunting noises resulted in
Matthieu's Mandrake 10.1 CDs being borrowed for an hour or two. The end result was a Mandrake machine which should make a good mail server when configuration is finished off. Although, for all we know Chris's saga may just finish off all of us and not just him. Many thanks to SuSE and Novell for providing us with some hilariously funny winter months.
The above was combined with some useful chat about software patents and what's happening with Gnome and KDE and the latest releases of the hundreds of versions of Linux that are out there just now. The words "Ubuntu Linux" seem to be getting around just now as is much chat about the 3.6 release of Knoppix.
The meeting finished at about 5 p.m. whereupon
five of us trudged across the road to the East Ocean Sea Food
Restaurant, 21-23 Matilda Street, Sheffield, S1 4QB, Tel: 0114 278
1888. This was our planned and annual Christmas dinner.
Great place for Japanese food. One of the lads tucked into the
offered Bento box with some passion while the rest of us tried the
Chinese cuisine and other Japanese offerings. It might not be all
that traditionally European in the food that is offered but what is
available is excellent. A good place to go for that slightly
different night out at a sensible price. We had a long discussion about
the upcoming DTI Meeting on Computer Implemented Inventions which will
take place in London on the 14th of December at the DTI Conference
centre at Victoria Street. This mixed with some chat about the
differences between the English and French approach to the use and
misuse of the internet between Matthieu and the rest of us Brits made
for an interesting two hours of conversation. For example, over
in France you can get an 8Mb internet connection for about £13 to
£20. Can you get that in England ? No, not a
chance. At the end we said our farewells and wished each other a
happy Christmas. Seems like the residents of Valence will be able
to see one of their more well known sons coming home for a happy time
and much fun with his new Acer/Mandrake Linux laptop.