04mar10

= 04 March 2010 LUG meeting notes =

We had our second Linux User's Group meeting yesterday 4-March-2010 (really the 1st "technical" meeting), ... although in some respects this was also like the 1st meeting, as we are still getting to know each other, and learn more about the Linux knowledge level of each user.

Clean install of openSUSE-11.2 on Dell laptop
The main topic was to do a "clean" install openSUSE-11.2 on a Dell Studio 1537 laptop PC with ATI Radeon HD3450 graphic hardware (but still keep the old /home from a previous Linux install), which did not go as smooth as I had anticipated - although we did succeed in the end. It turns out in my preparation I had neglected to disable the previous KDE-4.3.4 customized desktop which had been "tuned" for the proprietary ATI graphic ("fglrx") driver. So after the 11.2 install was complete, when openSUSE initially booted to KDE4 using the "radeonhd" graphic driver, the desktop froze. We did some debugging efforts (creating new user accounts) and managed to freeze the desktop twice more :) before we determined it was likely the graphic driver, and then by installing the proprietary ATI graphic driver we solved the problem. With the problem solved we were able to use previous/existing user accounts/setup and delete the newly created "debugging" users. We also did a quick install of Virtual Box (using the previously kept Virtual Box image setup in /home, and successfully ran WinXP in a virtual session under Linux).

Large size of Kernel and KDE updates
As an aside, when I got home I applied the official Novell openSUSE-11.2 update (which updated the kernel, applied many security fixes and updated KDE from 4.3.1 to 4.3.5) which was a massive 1.3 GByte update!! Novell have made KDE-4.3.5 an official update to openSUSE-11.2 as it means 11.2 will have the same KDE version planned for SLED-11 and thus Novell hope to save money in maintenance support by this commonality. However it means 11.2 users have a massive download after the install. Fortunately I have a high speed internet connection with no bandwidth limit. After the 1.3 GB update, I then replaced the Novell packaged multimedia apps with Packman packaged multimedia apps (which was another 300 MByte download) and 11.2 is now running mostly as before with 11.1, albeit I have some minor tuning left (such as setting up the webcam). I think 11.2 (with EXT4 file system in / ) is actually running faster than 11.1 (which had EXT3 file system in / ).

Private Laptop use large in LUG
Some of our users brought in their laptops, and clearly we have a massive scope for future subjects given the neat setups on many laptop's with different Linux distributions. For example we saw a neat gnome setup (with 3D special desktop effects enabled) from Eugenio at the end of the session, and we also saw a Linux install on a nice (and small) Asus eee PC (Patricks), ... plus other setups not mentioned (from Torsten and Manfred).

LUG laptop possibility
There is no word yet back from OCN if we will get any access to obsolete EUMETSAT PCs (preferably one to three laptops) for the user's group, but I am still hopeful this will be approved.

Future LUG planning
We need to give some thought as to:
 * when to have next meeting, and
 * what would be a good subject for next meeting.

As before, if someone else wishes to take the lead in coordinating our group, I'm happy to step aside. I always have more fun in the technical than in the management.

It would still be very useful if we can interest more "new" Linux users, and I'm hopefully once we are more established we can succeed there.

Lee