I'm one of the other dudes. When and where do you want to get together? I've got another machine we can try out that's even less impressive than your own, a 333 MHz PII. I installed Mepis on it two weeks ago. It's been my primary desktop since and I've been taking notes. The install was the easiest I've ever done, but updating was a little more trouble. I'd love to try it out on your much nicer box and test both computers with the AV system at Clickers.
I've got screen shots of lots of practical things with Mepis, trying to follow the minutes we made back in November. I'll have them up before the class. What I have right now is the quick and dirty review here: http://ensim.3esolutions.com/~hillnotes.org/brlug/sig.html There's plenty of annotating to do, but you can see what I've been doing with it. I'd like it to be a set of notes for the nebies to be able to reference for a while. One thing I need to try out still is kpackage as an updater. I torture tested the distro itself by using a CD that was two revisions out of date, 10 instead of 10_2, but I did it with dselect. It was not something a newbie would want to do, and it appeared to not work the first time. It grabbed up 527 MB worth of updates, representing some 800 improved packages! It took about 10 tries of install to get all the dependency problems out of the way and for it to work, but it did indeed work. Try swapping out 800 programs, including Office out on a M$ box, tee-hee. It took all afternoon and I'm afraid this is what will happen to the average newbie, who will probably wait a while before hitting the upgrade. I'd like to see how kpackage handles this. Note to Mepis people - it might be good to make a little GUI on first install that gets permission and frequency for chron job apt-get update and apt-get upgrade and the same popup GUI. Mepis Rocks. I've been turning people onto it at work, MSCEs and Microsoft Partners. Microsoft floods them with "information" on how to push their software over Linux and other free software, but the quality of Knoppix, Mepis and other free software is earning a place in their arsenal of solutions for customers. They already like Knoppix as diagnostic software, the easy install of Mepis is just what many were looking for. It's going to give them a something to push back against Dell and their difficult to beat sofware bundles. In the end, these guys are working for their customers and themselves, not Microsoft. The buzz is out there. I hope our little class pushes it further on. On Wednesday 10 March 2004 13:33, you wrote: > -----Original Message----- > From: John Hebert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > Sent: Wednesday, March 10, 2004 12:03 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: RE: [brlug-general] Need someone to fill in for me at > nextNewbiesmeeting; broken leg > > Early and smoke tests are my motto when I am the dude that has to be in > front of everyone. I'll run through it over the weekend as well. When you > know who that other person is going to be, I would suggest that he/she and > I get together over the weekend and let him/her take my machine just to > guarantee that it gets there even if I don't. The construction schedule for > this substation calls for testing of all of the protective relays starting > on Monday, so I may get tagged. Yes, my test machine is well suited for > these kinds of things and it can be made available at anytime for such. > Since I installed a drive bay in my main machine too, I seldom turn the > test machine on anymore unless I am also doing something on the main box > and don't want to shut it down. Is the plan to have everyone bring in their > machines and actually do an "InstallFest" on the users machines using > Mepis, or were you planning on just showing how to do it? Do you have any > kind of a lesson plan for the meeti! ng? Were you planning on showing how > to use the second Mepis CD and using apt-get, Synaptic, and/or Kpackage? > If you can't get someone to back me up, I should be 100% available the > following Monday. We are scheduled to bring this substation on line on > Thursday, March 18th and bring the plant back up the same day so, baring > any unforeseen problems, I should be back to my regular schedule the > following week. > > Ed Richards > >
