It was a good meeting. John Cole, Karthik, Will Hill, Stephen and a newbie
named Julie showed up. Perks was somewhat empty and there weren't many
(any?) laptops on the WAP. Karthik said throughput was great.
Julie had an interesting problem: she is a seminary student and needs to run
a Hebrew text analysis program on a Linux box, but she is a brand new
newbie. We suggested Knoppix and gave her a quick demo. We determined that
her laptop, an IBM Thinkpad Model 1171 with 32MB of RAM needed more RAM to
do what she wanted. We also discovered that Knoppix doesn't like Thinkpads,
but we got it to boot ("boot: knoppix nopcmcia nousb lang=us"). She needed
to compile her program from source, but GCC kept crapping out. I realized
after the meeting that we could have made a swap file after mounting the
FAT32 partition and improved performance, but she should still get the RAM
upgrade. She could also make a Knoppix boot floppy to keep her settings
(swapfile, mount FAT32, etc.) so she would be able to use Knoppix to run her
software without having to change her WinME install on her laptop, which was
a frightening proposition to me.
We discussed a few other issues. Stephen asked a question about how
openMosix did its clustering thing: is it truly clustered or just working in
parallel? I replied that I wasn't sure but I thought it just worked in
parallel; the FAQ on the openmosix site should have a better answer. Karthik
asked if openoffice.org was in the Links section on the BRLUG website. I
checked and it is not. In fact, there is a misleading link there stating
that Star Office is a free download. It is not free. This leads me to think
that we need a new links page administrator. Any volunteers? It is not a lot
of work, but it does need regular updating. Please let Dustin Puryear know
if you are interested.
The next meeting is 8/16/03 at the pizza place in Port Allen. Check the
event calendar at www.brlug.net for more details.
John Hebert
