2010 Meeting Minutes

Live forum: /viewtopic.php?t=236

waveclaw

07-01-2010 19:59:36

2010-01-04

Attendance
Lighter than usual due to the -20 wind chill outside.


Topic: Debugging Linux installs.

Randy has a new 20Gb Dell HV02T mp3 player and Ubuntu Linux 8.04 Linux.

Some music players can do dual mode: as a USB mass storage device or media device. For those that only support media devices Linux - and Windows and MACs - requires special drivers and software to load music to the device.

The recommendations on-line are to use Gnomad tool to sync. When the HV02T is plugged in and Gnomad is started, the player is detected.

The second hurdle is that most of Rany's music is in ogg format. Most players only support the MPEG Layer 3 or mp3 format. His files need to be converted mp3. Robert installed the highly rated soundConverter application for Ubuntu. This converted some of Rany's files from OGG Vorbis format to MP3 format. Since these are lossy compressed formats, the quality was somewhat reduced.

Once the music is in the correct format, it is just a matter of having Gnomad upload the files to the player.

Now Randy has music on his player.

CD Burning
David's PC won't burn CDs.

Mint 9, Ubuntu 9.04 using brasero reports there is no CD in the drive. It is an older PC, but his daughter's PC also has issues. cdrecord, the command line burner, has no issues with burning CDs on his system. It is the graphical clients that have issues.

Ubuntu in VirtualBox on Microsoft Windows
Ubuntu 9.10 is installed to a virtual box environment. The desktop is stuck at 800x600. The virtualbox ose guest tools were required to be installed. Then a manual configuration was written. The virtualbox guest tools detected higher resolutions, but the manual configuration of an /etc/X11/xorg.conf file is requires.

Q&A

Q: What is the difference between 'web browser,' a blue button by default on the Ubuntu desktop and firefox?

A: Ubuntu is a Debian Linux derivative for friendly easy access. The web browser is just a re-branded version of firefox of a difference version than you may expect. You can always download another version of firefox and install it if you do not like the version installed.

waveclaw

04-03-2010 08:33:45

I'm on-call at work this week and will not be able to attend and take notes.

waveclaw

01-04-2010 09:55:45

Linux SIG 2010-03-04

Last month was Android Phones.

This month is 'what to do with the SIG' and 'welcome to the lugnutz guys.'

Topic Brainstorming

What kinds of things to present?

Cellular Phone / Internet with Linux
Palm Pre
Cricket Devices (works with Ubuntu out of the box - recent version only)
Desktop Theming
Desktop environments
Desktop docks
Desktop doodads
10.04 - /etc/init.d and its replacement
Linux alternatives for windows stuff
open source on windows
wine
Knoppix re-mastering (bootable / live environment)
Linux distro overviews
cad/cam(eagle, etc)
Dia
Web design tools
Web browser parade
Development environments
Mail clients
Contact management on Linux
Filtering Spam or auto-filing
Linux community

lugnutz

The lugnutz local Linux user group has topics of a more advanced nature. May be of interest to some of the Linux SIG attendees as the SIG tries to focus on general interest and introductory material.

There is a new local "coco" facility at which some of the lugnutz people work, a Cooperative with many features useful for small businesses and the like. Has offices for rent. You can run a small F/OSS business out of it.

Process Improvements

The OKC Computer Group's Vice President of Special Interest Groups has an email list that may be interested in topics if they are announced ahead of time.

Wanting to get topics out ahead of time. Get the website updated. Take the sign-up sheets at try to put together at least some kind of email list.

Expect changes to the meeting format. Other presenters in particular.

waveclaw

01-04-2010 09:56:05

Duplicating Posts with horrendous errors? Yummy Debug messages, too.

waveclaw

02-06-2010 18:41:20

No meeting.

Several people showed. There was light discussion in the foyer.