Notes for Peterborough LUG Meeting 02Nov22 ------------------------------------------
I would have liked to have been able to get these notes out earlier but I hope they are still useful. Introduction ------------ Well I guess it might be the nadir point for the LUG meeting as there were just 2 attendees, myself and Andrew! Surprisingly perhaps we had an interesting meeting lasting the full 90 mins. It did demonstrate that as a matter of urgency I need to put in place a backup plan to ensure that illness, etc. does not jeapordise the meeting again. Meeting Rules ------------- Andrew said that the October meeting felt a little too unstructured. I explained the reason was that I favoured seeing where discussions led if they were both interesting and constructive rather than cut them short. I also wanted to encourage the maximum number of people to contribute. I am mindfull that around the table the people have an extraordinary amount of skill and experience on offer and I wished to bring as much of that out as possible to the benefit of the whole meeting. It is in the interractions that the true benefits of the meeting can be realised. If the meeting is too structured it could easily become stilted and self-limiting. As with everything there is of course a happy medium so attendees are requested to comment if they believe the meeting becomes too unstructured. Andrew and I agreed that it will always be a priority to ensure that the main theme of the meeting is completed to schedule. Andrew suggested that the social side of the meeting could perhaps be brought more to the fore. Certainly these are not meant to be business meetings. Linux News ---------- We went through some of the key new features of Linux Mint 21 using the meeting desktop machine. Andrew is a Ubuntu user so it was an interesting comparison. We walked through the configuration of Timeshift and took an incremental system snapshot. The snapshots allow you to go back to a previous configuration of your system if the current version is trashed for some reason or perhaps gets a virus. I believe the these snapshots can also be restored from a Live Disk if the system will not boot. For safety I would choose a Live Disk having the same version as the distribution in the snapshot. By taking snapshot just prior to each meeting I can blow away any changes made during the meeting by going back to the 'clean' version taken just prior the meeting. Timeshift will backup home folders but this is normally a bad idea as Timeshift will lose data if an older version of the home folder replaces an existing version. An alternative backup system should generally be used for all data. Theme: Ansible -------------- Tony was unable to make the meeting but we both looked forward to Tony being able to pick up the theme again in the future. The subject may seem to be a bit advanced and enterprise focussed but we both wanted to understand the concepts and see how they fitted in with other technologies. Perhaps Tony would consider picking up the theme at some point in the future. The conversation moved to the Flatpak software distribution system. The previously discussed Linux Mint 21 has strong support for Flatpak. The Flatpak system avoids the problem of creating different software builds for each distribution by defining a compatibility layer which once supported by a distribution allows all Flatpak software to be run on that distribution. There are costs wich are mainly the (much) larger file sizes for the Flatpak software builds as they need to bring in many of the libraries they need. There can apparently be a performance hit but I believe this to be less of an issue. "Snap" and "Appimage" are competing solutions. Andrew wasn't too sure of the benefits and by way of example I said that in the past it had enabled me to solve a problem with software in the standard distribution repository being either out of date or not working at all. Planning -------- This will be done on Discord. Andrew was of the opinion that Discord ought to replace the Mailing List completely. I have been using the Mailing List for the meeting notifications but they were not always seen and I miss the feedback I think I would probably get on Discord. So I will focus my attention more on Discord in the future. However I strongly support the idea of the LUG wiki and hope to provide some content when time permits. The wiki is our window to the world. There may be a case for creating a Discord channel something like "Group Notifications" to ensure that Group level posts are not lost in the general chatter, although that requirement may already be covered by the announcements channel, which is currently unused. Well, I hope the above is useful. Although it was my illness that was the cause of the low turnout I do hope we will be able to build the numbers up in the future. More members around the table will create more interest and mean a better "network effect". All comments most welcome. Regards, Clive -- Peterboro mailing list Peterboro@mailman.lug.org.uk https://mailman.lug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/peterboro
