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On 02/04/11 17:09, Paul Sutton wrote:
How did it go up in exeter today ? Paul
Quite well. I got there just after 1pm with the memory for 2 of the laptops. I fitted it and thankfully it worked okay, so we now have two laptops there with 1280MB Ram :-)
We got Linux Mint 10 LXDE edition installed on a couple of the laptops from USB stick. The version we were using was slightly modified in that it was using the LibreOffice and Mozilla Firefox PPA repositories which gave it Firefox 4 and LibreOffice 3.3.2 (I removed Gnumeric and Abiword).
We had a couple of non-LUG members turn up, a woman called Claire and her elderly father Ron who was interested in trying Linux.
He had an Acer Aspire desktop PC running Vista *shudders*. I installed Linux Mint 10 Gnome edition (the CD version) alongside his existing install of Vista and explained things as I was going along. So far so good until it came to doing the updates over the internet. He didn't have a wireless card in his desktop and there was no direct wired ethernet connection available. I did get around this by sharing the wifi using my laptop so he could pick up the internet via my laptop although it wasn't particuarly reliable.
He then told us that he was on Talktalk dialup. It turns out he has an old USB SpeedTouch 330 ADSL modem which Talktalk provided. So I then went with Ron and Claire over to his house and finished setting up his PC getting his Internet connection working with the modem (it's a pain in the backside to get working, there is an old Debian package available but it depends on some packages that aren't available in Ubuntu 10.10 or Linux Mint 10 but it doesn't actually need them to run!). In the end I extracted the Debian package and copied stuff into place manually to get him up and running.
So he's happy he's dual booting, he can get the Internet on Linux Mint, his printer was picked up straight away (it's an Epson Stylus) and I left him with my e-mail address and mobile number. I also installed TeamViewer on his machine so if he has any issues I *should* be able to offer a bit of support remotely (although I'm hoping I won't have to give him much support).
While I was installing Linux Mint on his desktop at the community centre his daughter Claire installed Linux Mint from a USB stick on one of the laptops. She said it was reasonabaly easy. She's going to come back next month and 'adopt' a laptop for £25. Rick is going to take a photo and try and get a press release about it in the paper. We're also going to look at updating the LTSP on the server there as I believe Ubuntu 8.04 LTS reaches end of life on the desktop this month.
It was good to see Viv and Phil too and I finally got to meet Dave Hare (at least I'm sure Rick said it was Dave Hare, appologies if I've got it wrong). I had a look at his Exlinux distro. It was interesting to see KDE 3.5 still being supported (personally out of KDE 3.5 and KDE 4 I prefer KDE 3.5).
I gather too from Rick that someone else turned up after I left and got some assistance with something, Rick did say but I can't remember what it was now :-P
So anyway, yeah was good, looking forward to the next meeting, hopefully more of us from Torbay will be able to make it since it the Paignton and Exwick meets will be on different days (also means I can make the Paignton meet again, it's been a while since I've been to the Paignton meet for one reason or another).
Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq