September Meeting 2004
September 2004 saw a great start to the month
where temperatures soared and many people were seen taking an early
trip to the local pub for light refreshment. In our case
September is the start of the Autumn season and a welcome return to the Hillsborough Hotel. Scene of many an Open Source and Free software occasion.
Although two people had to phone in claiming that their relatives were ill and they couldn't make it we still managed to have a really good meeting with the people who came along. John Southern of Linux Magazine came here from Cheshire bringing Debian Linux CDs with him which were immediately pressed into use. Great to see him in action once again. Seb James came to the meeting and brought a working version of his embedded Linux systems with him. Hypercube Systems produce these for anyone who wants one. John and Seb must have discussed the hardware and software for almost an hour while the rest of us watched or joined in for short periods. On the software side the base system is as small as 700 Kilobytes, plus the kernel. The OS can be offered with Xorg to build graphical interfaces. Hypercube Systems can develop customised applications based on the gtk+ toolkit (as used in the Gnome desktop) or supply a development environment for customers to develop their own applications. The system is fully optimised from the ground up, to ensure that it runs well on lower spec devices. The OS was shown to Sheflug running on an imported thin client platform from the Taiwanese manufacturer Termtek. The Termtek box features a 533 MHz VIA CPU with 64 MB of RAM and a 64 MB flash disk storing the OS. Hypercube Linux boots in less than 15 seconds on this platform - that's 15 seconds from starting to uncompress Linux to a fully loaded IceWM based graphical environment.
After the general discussion of Hypercube hardware we moved on to my own Libretto which hasn't worked for some time. John Southern showed how to strip one of these cult items down and re-seat the memory. Then someone from Leeds rebuilt the software to try to get the kernel to boot properly. Not a chance. Time for a re-install. Break for more beer and more chat whilst someone gets out the Debian CDs.
Strangely, the Debian Sarge ISO images that had been available on the net a couple of weeks ago have now disappeared. John brought along what he thought was Sarge and then we found out it was the second release of Woody. Some banging of heads against wood for a while. Then we installed Debian into a machine just to see what would happen.
A good meeting was rounded off with some discussion of some of the meetings that are promised for later this year. We look forward to our Autumn lecture series. This was quite amazing last year. Well worth a trip along the road to join in.
Richard
www.sheflug.co.uk
Although two people had to phone in claiming that their relatives were ill and they couldn't make it we still managed to have a really good meeting with the people who came along. John Southern of Linux Magazine came here from Cheshire bringing Debian Linux CDs with him which were immediately pressed into use. Great to see him in action once again. Seb James came to the meeting and brought a working version of his embedded Linux systems with him. Hypercube Systems produce these for anyone who wants one. John and Seb must have discussed the hardware and software for almost an hour while the rest of us watched or joined in for short periods. On the software side the base system is as small as 700 Kilobytes, plus the kernel. The OS can be offered with Xorg to build graphical interfaces. Hypercube Systems can develop customised applications based on the gtk+ toolkit (as used in the Gnome desktop) or supply a development environment for customers to develop their own applications. The system is fully optimised from the ground up, to ensure that it runs well on lower spec devices. The OS was shown to Sheflug running on an imported thin client platform from the Taiwanese manufacturer Termtek. The Termtek box features a 533 MHz VIA CPU with 64 MB of RAM and a 64 MB flash disk storing the OS. Hypercube Linux boots in less than 15 seconds on this platform - that's 15 seconds from starting to uncompress Linux to a fully loaded IceWM based graphical environment.
After the general discussion of Hypercube hardware we moved on to my own Libretto which hasn't worked for some time. John Southern showed how to strip one of these cult items down and re-seat the memory. Then someone from Leeds rebuilt the software to try to get the kernel to boot properly. Not a chance. Time for a re-install. Break for more beer and more chat whilst someone gets out the Debian CDs.
Strangely, the Debian Sarge ISO images that had been available on the net a couple of weeks ago have now disappeared. John brought along what he thought was Sarge and then we found out it was the second release of Woody. Some banging of heads against wood for a while. Then we installed Debian into a machine just to see what would happen.
A good meeting was rounded off with some discussion of some of the meetings that are promised for later this year. We look forward to our Autumn lecture series. This was quite amazing last year. Well worth a trip along the road to join in.
Richard
www.sheflug.co.uk