Thursday October 12,2000
There were about 20 people. More new faces again.
There were 6 computers being worked on.
This was a fun meeting.
Seth gave a demonstration on how lynx can be used for a text based browser and
still bring up pictures. So for all you lynx fans out there yes you can see
pictures. He went to show me how it worked and it failed probably failed
because he was going to show me. He said "really it was working". It was
funny everyone wanted him to get the pictures back. He got it working.
It was nice see lynx being able to do that. Now he has to tell us how he did
it again.
Cory,(his first time here) who has been posting e-mails came. He got X running on his
laptop.
We had fun afterward. He started playing around with the screen saver running
in the background (wallpaper). I showed him where to find the
xscreensaver-demo and then he started trying each one as a background. Well
that wasn't good enough for Cory he wanted more. He wanted to push Linux. So
he got 4 screen saver backgrounds going at the same time. Mike said "funny
tricks we can do with xscreensavers." Paul's comment was "Stupid wallpaper
tricks." It was easy to do. Pull up a xterm. Let's use for example pyro and
rocks. Enter this "pyro -root &" and at the next prompt enter "rocks -root".
To quit the screen savers as the background Control-C to cancel rocks then at
the prompt type "fg" then Control-c to cancel pyro. Easy and Fun to show off
what linux can do.
A couple of us talked about hdparm. There is a man page on it which is well
documented.
Mike noticed a big jump. I got double my speed. It's a very useful command
to keep hard drives from spinning down and other good things. The e-mail
posted the last week talked about it and showed some of the parameters.
Read the Man pages they explain a lot of information.
Mike and Seth showed us some good GNU/Debian commands, apt-cache search filename
and dpkg-reconfigure debconf. There are man pages for the apt commands. I
finally read through some of them. For those of you who run Debian try reading
them.
There was a discussion on how linux is unifying the unixes. This can be seen
with the Gnome desktop which will give a common desktop for all the Unixes.
This will stave off Microsoft infringement into the Unixes markets. We talked
Java and .net. The prevailing thought was Microsoft bought into Corel so if
Corel went under Microsoft wouldn't be the only Office Suite. There are two
word processors most people use Word and Wordperfect. If Corel went under it
would only legitimize the justice departments claim. The other reason is MS
can show it has other software vendors behind their .net plan. Most of us
felt the .net plan won't work.
I want to thank everyone for saying they appreciate me writing what happened.
This is what make linux a great community. I'd like to thank all of you who
put your input in e-mail and attended the Thursday's meetings. I'd like to
Thank Seth,Mike,Jamie and Ralph and Stan who've helped me with my newbie
questions. Through the year I've learned and now feel competent to help others.
This what makes the Linux community the best. I want to thank you.
If you haven't attended a meeting yet and have been reading the e-mails or have
been posting come and meet the faces that go with the names. You might find
you'll might like the group of us who attend. For those of you who haven't
showed up for a while come on down and let us know how your doing.
The meeting ended before 11. Actually Mike used his Military training to route
us out. :-)
Hope to see you there Thursday.
Tim
