February 2005 Meeting
Our February 2005 meeting was a happy post Christmas return to a much liked venue which is room 7328 at the Stoddart building, Sheffield Hallam University.
About fifteen people came along to continue the discussion that we
started about six years ago about where the use of GNU/Linux is going
to and what's happening with an ever more popular KDE desktop which at
the time of writing is at the KDE 3.3.2 stage whilst Gnome is the 2.8
version and Windowmaker is presently 0.91.
The meeting started early when one of the lads came in from the outer reaches of Sheffield complaining
about the fact that he couldn't get his wireless community project
network going with Fedora core 3. This wasn't much of a surprise
to either myself or other people who arrived later on. If you
want Wi-Fi with ACX100 drivers then SuSE 9.2 is the only distribution
that you can use. Since re-compiling kernels has never been a
valid option for anyone - a waste of valuable time if ever there was
one - then it's best to install SuSE 9.2 for this purpose. In
fact, the SuSE software is the only version we have seen which can
support software RAID and related drivers out of the box without having
to do anything. RedHat and Fedora Core 3 definitely does not do
that without a lot of unnecessary command line hacking. Four
different people came to this same conclusion over the course of the
afternoon.
More recently there has been much more interest in the use of Linux on the
laptop. I myself had three requests for how to install and use
Linux on the desktop with all sorts of laptop hardware at this
meeting. Might be that we'll be installing some more laptops in
the months ahead. Suddenly desktop Linux is more popular than the
Macintosh desktop and Microsoft would seem to be aware of some
competition from places like the OpenOffice office suite which is now so sophisticated that not many people can believe what they are looking at when they first see it.
The 2.6 kernel has been causing some problems in its earlier versions for a lot of people. The 2.6.10 kernel is now upon us and this seems to have fixed quite a few issues.
We look forward now to our annual open source seminar on the 2nd of March which will take place at the Megacentre at Bernard Road, Sheffield. This year we expect to see something like 200 people arrive and join in with the rest of us. At the time of writing the UK internet is already alive with news and information about our event. Let's hope that it is everything that we think it will be. Previous seminars were excellent and difficult to get into due to the fact that the event was very popular.
Richard
www.sheflug.co.uk
The meeting started early when one of the lads came in from the outer reaches of Sheffield complaining
about the fact that he couldn't get his wireless community project
network going with Fedora core 3. This wasn't much of a surprise
to either myself or other people who arrived later on. If you
want Wi-Fi with ACX100 drivers then SuSE 9.2 is the only distribution
that you can use. Since re-compiling kernels has never been a
valid option for anyone - a waste of valuable time if ever there was
one - then it's best to install SuSE 9.2 for this purpose. In
fact, the SuSE software is the only version we have seen which can
support software RAID and related drivers out of the box without having
to do anything. RedHat and Fedora Core 3 definitely does not do
that without a lot of unnecessary command line hacking. Four
different people came to this same conclusion over the course of the
afternoon.More recently there has been much more interest in the use of Linux on the
laptop. I myself had three requests for how to install and use
Linux on the desktop with all sorts of laptop hardware at this
meeting. Might be that we'll be installing some more laptops in
the months ahead. Suddenly desktop Linux is more popular than the
Macintosh desktop and Microsoft would seem to be aware of some
competition from places like the OpenOffice office suite which is now so sophisticated that not many people can believe what they are looking at when they first see it.The 2.6 kernel has been causing some problems in its earlier versions for a lot of people. The 2.6.10 kernel is now upon us and this seems to have fixed quite a few issues.
We look forward now to our annual open source seminar on the 2nd of March which will take place at the Megacentre at Bernard Road, Sheffield. This year we expect to see something like 200 people arrive and join in with the rest of us. At the time of writing the UK internet is already alive with news and information about our event. Let's hope that it is everything that we think it will be. Previous seminars were excellent and difficult to get into due to the fact that the event was very popular.
Richard
www.sheflug.co.uk