Our July meeting was a lively discussion between eight people and three computers.   The original plan was to set up some computer games and have some fun with them for an hour or two.   As always happens with people we managed to wander off to other things.  It was rather like a conversation in a pub but without the beer.

Sammy Redshaw brought his games machine over to play with and it did work very well with Quake III.  Well done Sammy.  Hope we can get more people to do that in future ?  Craig Andrews brought his machine over but the weight of his 17" monitor was just too much for him to move.  Perhaps we should send him on a body building course ?  My own demo PC was nothing out of the ordinary.  450Mhz AMD K6-2 cpu with an S3 graphics card.  Civilisation Call to Power works very well on this hardware.  Wouldn't like to run Quake III on it though.  Someone else brought his laptop over and we had a quick look at muLinux.  His main problem was that he couldn't do "whereis" and "find"  which was "something of a pain" for him.  He's going to install something else.

One of the more pleasant suprises was that Craig brought over some Cheapbytes KDE 2 and GNOME 1.2 CDs.  This provided a certain amount of entertainment.  So did Corel Wordperfect 2000 for Linux when we tried to instal it into SuSE 6.4.

The new GNOME system installs itself in a similar way to the way in which MS Windows applications install themselves.  Even on a computer with 128Mb of RAM it did take 30 minutes to install.  After which we found that there were one or two minor bugs that didn't really matter too much.  The new GNOME is very nice with Sawmill as the window manager as default rather than Enlightenment.  To change to Enlightenment you just point and click.  All of that stuff to do with sweating over the keyboard has gone.

The KDE2 install proved to be something of a session to do with chicken bones and some dice.  Throw the chicken bones and roll the dice to find out whether it's going to install ?  Craig had to use all of his best efforts to key in the wrong stuff by accident to get it to work.  This was from the July 2000 issue of Linux Format.  KDE 1.9 is beta software but in our experience it's more alpha than beta.  After installation we found that there were more bugs that just didn't help at all.  When KDE2 is released it should be fairly incredible.  It's going to be a very nice system with Koffice as one of it's attributes.

Speaking of office suites.  We just happened to have a copy of Wordperfect Office 2000 for Linux.  We decided to install it into SuSE 6.4 just to see what happened.  After much scratching of heads we found that su to root and then do......  ln -s /lib/libc.so.6  /lib/libc-6.so  was the way to install it.  After that it worked fine.  Just a slight problem with winelib at the first try.

The meeting finished at four o'clock in the afternoon and shortly afterwards a RHCE turned up from Sheffield Hallam University.  I pointed him towards our discussion list with the explanation that we're a bit short on Red Hat support.

It was a good meeting which correctly informed all of us.  This is probably the best way to deal with issues that are to do with Linux ?

People who were there .......

Sammy Redshaw            Craig Andrews            Richard Ibbotson            Alex Hudson            Peter Smith            Elliot Frost    and some others.