Devon and Cornwall GNU/Linux Users Group

Exeter Raspberry Pi jam – 1/11/2014

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Today was another excellent pi jam up in Exeter,  and well attended,  the word is getting out there.

Highlights

Tom Brough demonstrated the parity bit trick and also had some coloured cones to demonstrate how a bubble sort works,  you can try this take about 8 cones of different sizes and put them randomly in a line now sort them one by one so the line goes from biggest to smallest.

I spent some time, with some help working on getting scratch to talk to the pi liter,  once done (not too difficult) we spent some time then creating a program that is the same as the chaser type program written in python.  This works really well,  further enhancements allows the user to interact, chance speed as well as stop / start the routine.

I also had a chat with another user who showed me his chromebook running lubuntu.  This was also connected to the Pi with vnc,  the performance was excellent.

Ivan was also showing various projects and we had minecraft running on another pi.  In the fab lab was the usual beginner work shop where you can learn to light up leds on a bread (project) board using the raspberry Pi GPIO

So in all excellent,   Looking forward to next week as it is the Torbay Pi jam from 1 – 3 at Paignton Library,   good news is that the 3 sd cards (well micro + adapters) arrived to day so these are all ready for next week,    I may look at preparing at least one with Noobs,  as this may save time next week.

Thank you to Simon and Exeter library for hosting another pi jam and everyone who attended.

Coder Dojo South West

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coderdojo1

Coder dojo is coming to the South West,  they are looking for volunteers for Liskeard, Exeter and Torbay (Paignton).

Coderdojo is the global network of free computer programming clubs for young people.

https://coderdojo.com/

If you can help or are a young person interested in attending or a parent who has a child that is interested in attending you can e-mail  coderdojo@barclays.com however please make it clear where you are as in if you are in Torbay then please make subject header coderdojo Torbay.

you can also follow https://twitter.com/Digitaleagles or https://twitter.com/CoderDojo

Coder Dojo

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coderdojo1

CodeDojo –

The global network of free computer programming clubs for young people. – See more at: https://coderdojo.com/#sthash.iAnaAXL4.dpuf
Is looking to start up clubs in the following areas
Torbay – Paignton
Exeter
Liskeard
And is looking for Volunteers to help mentor young people in coding, programming etc
We have access to venues via Barclays Bank Branches which have Wif
If you are able to get involved you can find out more at https://coderdojo.com/
Contact details are at https://coderdojo.com/contact/
e-mail : coderdojo@barclays.com please make it clear Where you are based or want to / able to help.
twitter : @coderdojo   https://twitter.com/Digitaleagles  for more info.

October Pi jam

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Great pi jam today

Despite the low turn out, if you didn’t make you once again missed out on some cool projects,  computer science related stuff as well as demos.

1. Knights tour,   – using a chess board how do you move 1 knight so it goes over each square once, only using the valid moves a knight can make ?

2. Sort program,  this is was a demo of the article that Tom Brough wrote yesterday  You can read the info http://www.dcglug.org.uk/network-sort-algorithm-animation/ If you would like to see the demo come to the Jam on the 8th November 2014.

3. Minecraft,  one of our younger members was using a laptop to create a 8 bit adder circuit in mine craft,  yep you can build computers inside minecraft,  again if you want to know more come next time

4. We also set up another young persons Pi , downloaded xfce so we could run that instead of the default lxde desktop environment.  It worked great once we got the pi toNovember connect to the internet then figured out how to tell X to load xfce.   Tom and Mark did a great job with this.

I brought along some cards with 1’s and 0’s,  to demonstrate how binary works,  Will make some more up for next time, I also need to bring extra power supplies along.   We made great use of the laptops donated by Dan Smith at the last jam.

Once again we did more than JUST raspberry pi.  We are focussing on computer science and coding too.

Hopefully, next month we can get a full demo of the minecraft 8 bit adder,  as it’s really interesting (and kinda complex) but it should be possible to also use my binary cards to explain what is happening in a different way.  Want to know how 1 + 1 = 11  then come along next time.

Usual goodies of free stickers are still available along with gummy bears,

 

 

Ubuntu 14.10 coming soon

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The next release of Ubuntu 14.10 Utopic Unicorn should be available shortly, October 23rd

http://www.ubuntu.com/

To see the release schedule please go to

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UtopicUnicorn/ReleaseSchedule

OR

Why not sign up to the 15.04 testing team and help test 15.04 due for release in April 2015

In the mean time read what Mark Shuttleworth has to say about Full convergence of operating systems.

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Mark-Shuttleworth-Says-Ubuntu-Will-Achieve-Full-Convergence-with-15-04-Before-Windows-412569.shtml

Lets help make this happen.

Debian Jessie Beta 2

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The Debian Installer team[1] is pleased to announce the second beta
release of the installer for Debian 8 "Jessie".


Important changes in this release of the installer
==================================================

 * Gnome is now the default desktop environment on Linux again.
 * A list of desktop environments is displayed in tasksel, making it
   easy to install another desktop environment (or several of them).
   Unfortunately that is currently a bit underdocumented (#764026).
 * Preliminary support for the arm64 and ppc64el architectures has been
   added.


Other changes in this release of the installer
==============================================

 * brltty: Append the configuration inherited from d-i to the end of
   brltty.conf instead of overwriting it (which was thus losing the
   documentation for the user).
 * brltty: Enable accessibility in XFCE, LXDE and MATE sessions too.
 * busybox: Add support for /32 subnets in udhcpc script (#652573).
 * choose-mirror: Strip off any scheme part found at the start of
   mirror/*/hostname (#706191).
 * console-setup: Correct default keymap for South Korea (#756052).
 * console-setup: Use nepali keymap for Nepali and Tharu by default.
 * debian-installer:
    - Fix the PXE boot images built for kfreebsd, hurd (#759686).
    - Add fonts-lohit-guru-udeb to gtk images, fixing rendering for
      Punjabi (#761573).
    - Remove desktop selection from syslinux; now available in
      tasksel.
    - Keep Linux modules.builtin file in the initrd.
    - Fix lib location and search path for syslinux >= 5 (#756275).
 * fontconfig: Add conf.avail directory to the udeb, fixing broken
   Monospace font in graphical installer (#739011).
 * hw-detect: Improve driver injection disk support.
 * hw-detect: Move firmware installation code to pre-pkgsel.d
 * hw-detect: Correct detection of Macs needing to blacklist snd-aoa
   modules (#650588).
 * iso-scan: Do not error out when searching in folders with
   shell-special characters in their name (#640789).
 * lowmem: Update lowmem limits for linux-x86.
 * lowmem: Make the / ramfs fill the whole memory again (#759336).
 * netcfg: Do not kill_dhcp_client after setting the hostname and
   domain, otherwise Linux udhcpc will stop renewing its lease, and on
   other platforms dhclient will de-configure the network interface
   (#757711, #757988).
 * netcfg: Don't copy /etc/network/interfaces to /target if
   netcfg/target_network_config=ifupdown (#709017).
 * netcfg: Fix support for entering an ESSID manually, it was
   previously getting ignored (#757478).
 * preseed: Update auto-install/defaultroot for jessie.
 * preseed: Always disable locale & keyboard question when auto is
   enabled, even if no preseed file was given on boot, in case the dhcp
   server provides it (#759290).
 * rootskel: Update lowmem limit for gtk on linux-x86.
 * rootskel: Use a tmpfs for some directories to avoid running out of
   space in the fixed-size initrd on kfreebsd-* (#757985).
 * rootskel-gtk: Update gtk-set-font to learn a new mapping (Lohit
   Punjabi).


Hardware support changes
========================

 * libdebian-installer: arm64: Detect UEFI based systems as "efi"
   subarch.
 * libdebian-installer: Add ppc64 and ppc64el support.
 * linux:
    - Include preliminary support for arm64 and ppc64el.
    - udeb: Add ccm, ctr to crypto-modules (#761902).
    - [armhf] udeb: Add ehci-platform, ohci-platform and phy-sun4i-usb
      to usb-modules (#761591).
    - udeb: Add rsi_usb to nic-wireless-modules
    - udeb: Add ath6kl_sdio, libertas_cs, libertas_sdio, mwifiex_sdio,
      r8192u_usb, r8723au, rtl8188eu, rtl818x_pci, rtl8723be,
      rtl8821ae, spectrum_cs to nic-wireless-modules.
    - [armel/orion5x] udeb: Include mvmdio in nic-modules udeb.
    - udeb: Add new sound drivers to sound-modules (#756998).


Known bugs in this release
==========================

 * Firmware handling: udev no longer reports missing firmware
   (#725714), and patches for the kernel need polishing before we are
   able to restore support for loading missing firmware.
 * CD-ROM modules are missing on ppc64el, but the netboot flavour is
   working correctly. This will be fixed in the next release.


Feedback for this release
=========================

We need your help to find bugs and further improve the installer, so
please try it. Installer CDs, other media and everything else you will
need are available at our web site[3].


Thanks
======

The Debian Installer team thanks everybody who has contributed to this
release.

 1. http://wiki.debian.org/DebianInstaller/Team
 2. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/errata
 3. http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer