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On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 10:21 +0000, Rob Beard wrote: > If it wasn't so far I would have > probably made it but it's a good 5 hours there and back from Torquay > (according to Google) so it's a long journey to do in a day with not > much sleep. If we have any more meetings at this end, please ask to stay over - we have space. This applies to any member. > > Maybe next time I could make a weekend of it. It's worth the journey just to savour the far west. I was pleased with the meeting. The membership brought some excellent things to see and hear. Mike ssh-ing to his home computer, Viv with her Virtualbox (which amazed most people), Chris with his PCLos advice. Gemma came all the way from Plymouth with great experience and expertise. Viv's husband (Paul?) came along and chipped in - as a nearly new user, the conversations went over my head a lot, but pointed the way for me personally and seemed to give members something more than a social. Grant came along later and was able to advise where he could and discuss possibilities of Linux at Cornwall College. We had a couple of older citizens wanting to try GNU/Linux out, one who programmed in COBOL way back in the last century and he could even get advice on how to get started in Ubuntu (or PCLos) with it. As the holder of several iso's I had prepared on CD (one on dvd) I was the one who showed the beginners how to install - embarrassing to find a couple of iso's that could not install - found others that could. Tested the ecafe computers to the limit and discovered a badly-functioning hard drive which cured one problem. Put on Fedora 8 which seemed good. Another of Stephen's staff came along and was impressed enough to add Ubuntu to his pen drive along with other FSW. These chaps are brilliant. The guy who was installing Ubuntu on a Mac came back with an improved set up - still unable to get GRUB working - had to click on a Windows image to get Ubuntu! I suppose it thinks all guests have to be Windows. Some discussion of the way to run several distros on one machine - Mike has one partition and installs in separate folders. It seems to give much more flexibility. Please tell us how Mike. Does this include Windows? Is WINE dying, in the face of VMWare and Virtualbox (and one other I couldn't see) and is having 3 layers the best way? How do you upgrade the bottom layer? I must have missed some of the goodies promised: Web Converger, putting a distro on a pen drive. I was sad Mark had left the LUG after the last round of why Debian is so much better than Ubuntu as we missed Edubuntu and games under Linux and Wine (though if you have a legal install of a Windows, perhaps the virtual way is better). Publicity seems to be the key. The article in the Cornishman drew one at least and my posters in Penzance drew another. Networking produced another and word of mouth from members and Stephen produced another couple. (I waylaid 2 in the ecafe who happened to be there.) No school accepted an invitation. I failed to get any interest from the BBC, ITV, local radio from emailing a press release with the suggestion they make a feature of it. I would take the plunge and offer a phoned interview next time (or get someone more quaified to do so, perhaps as a duo. If we get a couple of new members from the 2 meetings, (potentially 3 from the conversations we had), we may get to the point where we could sustain regular meetings down here. Perhaps members could give their own reports and thoughts. I have one other friend who uses Unix at his veterinary practice and SUSE at home. -- james kilty http://www.kilty.demon.co.uk -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html