Upcoming Meetings
Thursday 24th April 2008 at 7pm in Horsham, joining Sussex Linux User Group for a talk on photography.
Saturday 10th May 2008 all day in Woking, joining Surrey Linux User Group (Not meeting at Surrey University in Guildford this month).
Requests Welcome
Please contact me to request a particular topic. At the moment a few of us travel up to Guildford on the second Saturday of each month for the Surrey LUG "BringABox" meeting, to Horsham on the last Thursday of every month for the Sussex LUG "moot", and to anywhere else that seems promising. Even as far afield as Southampton to join HantsLUG.
However, I would be more than pleased to arrange a local get-together.
Past Meetings
March 2008
On the second Saturday three of us attended the Surrey LUG meeting at Guildford University. Just two short talks: one explained the Linux file system and the other showed how to troubleshoot various parts of the system. Other than that, just informal hacking*.
[* For those new to computing, the term "hacking" is applied to workarounds and getting things done, whereas "cracking" is the activity of trying to break systems. So hacking is friendly - and often done in groups.]
On the 12th I made a special trip down to Sussex University at Falmer to attend a British Computer Society evening. The speaker successfully showed us how to build an online conference booking system in an hour using Grails. Grails is a scripting language leveraging Java and is extremely simple to learn to use. You can build a basic application extremely quickly, then learn how to apply customisation if and as you need it. It runs in the Eclipse environment. As you start building the application it automatically creates the tables in its own built-in database. Or you can put in more effort and use an external database. A great framework, well worth looking into.
On Thursday 27th March 2008 at 7pm, we joined Sussex Linux User Group in Horsham for a social evening.
February 2008
The Sussex LUG held a "Top Ten Tips in Ten Minutes" session. We like these. Each participant has the chance to present their own top ten tips to the group. Mine included use of DSL (Damn Small Linux) to make use of old hardware and remastering Knoppix or Fedora with all your favourite settings.
January 2008
The largest number of people turned up at the end of January for Steve's talk and demo of the VI editor. This took place at the Sussex LUG meeting in Horsham on the last Thursday. Steve went through all his favourite commands to manipulate text in a file, bring in text from other files, move lines around, replace strings and all sorts of tricks. Slides available. Richie showed off a VI mug covered with common commands and shortcuts and was inundated with orders - even at £16 a pop :)
December 2007
Might have been a quiet month this month. There's never a Sussex LUG meeting in December.
However, to make up for this Alex and I drove down to see what Brighton LUG get up to in the Evening Star by the station. First Wednesday in December. About eight of them showed up, two with handheld devices running two different versions of Linux. I had a go at trying to master Graffiti, the handwriting tool. I _finally_ managed to write my name and a word or two on one of the devices and turned to the other one. This had Graffiti2, with different strokes for the letters, and I had another go. It's okay once you get used to it and can work out faster than using the tiny on-screen keyboard. Then we fought over an Eee PC. Beautiful. A good evening with lots of chat and techie discussion.
On the second Saturday the usual three of us planned to attend the all-day Surrey meeting in Guildford, in particular for a scheduled talk on Drupal, the content management system. I have a strong interest in this. Unfortunately they had to cancel at short notice, so we arranged to drive to Guildford anyway and join Jim to go to the HantsLUG meeting in Southampton. This was a great success, with an excellent talk and demo by Jim on "First impressions of the Asus 701 Eee Pc and Xandros Linux". I also got a personal impromptu demonstration of another Eee PC using a 3G equivalent mobile internet dongle. The owner pulled up a map page showing UK coverage and explained that your choice of product should depend on whichever location you needed to access the Internet from. Speedwise, it seemed passable. There was also a brief look at an Intel Classmate. Finally, I had all my questions regarding boot sequence answered by Hugo, who spent some time explaining and diagramming it for me in a way I could understand. Thanks, Hugo.
November 2007
A fun talk and demo, Life Without X, happened at the end of the month. "X" is the name for the graphics element of the system: the part that gives you the windowing environment. Without it, there's only the stark black terminal. But Gavin showed exactly how much productivity you can get out of a terminal. This included a terminal spreadsheet, SC, which displays cells in a grid and allows you to move around the cells and edit them, inserting the usual formulae. He explained how he deliberately tried to use it without looking at the manual and found it reasonably intuitive.
October 2007
I traveled back to Guildford with two other EGLUG members for another all-day LUG meeting. This time we were introduced to PHP frameworks. One advantage of a framework is that whenever patches are applied to a language by its development team, application developers further down the chain need only upgrade their framework and all "holes" are instantly and automatically remedied. Thus, your app is kept more secure. We were shown CodeIgnite and Seagull. Easy! As has become customary, we retired to the campus bar afterwards (photo at foot of page).
At the end of the month we went to Horsham for a comprehensive, highly successful live demonstration on cable networking and subnets, including a selection of software necessary to maintain, secure and monitor it all.
September 2007
Three of us joined with the combined Surrey and Hants LUGs at Guildford for an all-day meeting, where among other things I joined in a GIMP group and watched the configuration of a graphics tablet. I enjoyed a programming talk: Introduction to Perl: The friendly programming language, which revolved around the libraries and framework. At the end of the meeting I ended up with a pirate's treasure chest!
We then traveled to Horsham for the end-of-month talk on Why Software Should be Free, followed by an impromptu live demonstration of an Ubuntu installation on a brand new desktop PC. This included configuring the screen resolution on a brand new TFT screen and a valiant (but ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to get the new member's wireless card to connect to the Internet. We were hampered, absurdly, by not a single one of us having a cross-over* cable with us :(
* A cross-over cable allows two PCs to connect together. In Simon's case, he could then have connected to the Internet via someone else's machine and downloaded the exact wireless card driver to match his hardware configuration. Moral: always carry a cross-over cable ...
July and August 2007
No East Grinstead meeting :-(
LUGMaster moving house :-( going on holiday :-) and coming back to a
protracted BT fault :-(
We still all drove down to the Horsham LUG meeting in these months, though, as every month so far. These evenings are always eventful and worthwhile - I usually have a spare place in my car for anyone who would like to join us.
June 2007: Networking (became: Ubuntu)
Networking was the requested topic, but as the requester was unwell and could not attend, this topic has been postponed. Instead, we just messed around with Ubuntu on laptops.
May 2007: Asterisk
After finally coming up with a popular topic for this month, I managed two meetings on Thursday 24th and Tuesday 29th May. These were two workshops at members' homes on setting up Asterisk, the Internet telephony system. We were well armed with equipment, books and magazines. Between us we also had two sip phones, a Sipura 3000 and a SipGate account. After session one we agreed to settle on TrixBox as the Asterisk front end. This runs on CentOS and was a walkover to install. The main fun and games was in configuring the X100P FXO PCI card to talk over the Internet, a feat still in progress as I write. Consequently we are in need of session number three...
April 2007: New Life for Old Hardware
The April presentation was one week later than normal on Thursday 19th. It differed from all the others in that it was intentionally aimed at users who had no previous experience of Linux. The theme was 'New Life for Old Hardware', presented by myself. The main goal of the evening was to show how to install Linux where there is no CD-ROM. I took along a PII desktop and 7 laptops: 1 P4, 4 PIIIs, 2 PIIs and even a PI, plus installation equipment alternatives: USB external hard drive, CD-ROM and floppy drives. The slide show was created and shown on a PII 400MHz desktop with 320MB RAM. I stressed that memory is an important factor in basic computing, more so than processing power. I handed round a laptop hard drive and its connector and pointed out how to connect them properly and explained all the other equipment. I gave a live installation demonstration using the swapped hard drive method, as this involves no software changes at all. The P4 laptop was the installer machine and a CD-less PIII 128MB RAM laptop was the target machine. One of the attendees then had a go with perfect success. At the end, I showed some of the different software programmes and let the participants loose. There are various flavours of Linux and the one I recommended for 128MB RAM machines was Xubuntu, whereas for even older machines I recommended Damn Small Linux (DSL)
March 2007: Wireless ADSL Routers
Thursday 8th March 2007. We had an interesting talk and practical demonstration on configuring wireless ADSL routers. This was given by guest speaker Desmond from the Surrey Linux User Group. One of the participants brought along a "troublesome" network card and Desmond went through a diagnostic procedure. Desmond managed to make it work, but it was eventually decided that it wasn't fully supported under Linux and a list of better supported cards was then produced. We also learned exactly how to configure the router itself, including full NAT, enabling the wireless feature and most importantly, securing the wireless feature.
February 2007: Joy of X
Thursday 8th February 2007. This month's presentation was Joy of X: How to configure the X windowing system and what you can do with it. Our guest speaker was Steve from the Sussex Linux User Group who has had a lot of practice on setting up X. He took us through the technical steps, explaining the theory as he went, and ended up with a couple of practical demonstrations. The best part was being shown how to control one machine from another machine. I was successfully able to get this working afterwards on my home PCs.
January 2007: Social Evening
Thursday 11th January 2007. Social evening at the pub round the corner to discuss Linux issues.
December 2006: Distro Frenzy
Thursday 14th December 2006. Distro Frenzy: looking at some different distros and trying out some installations. I brought along some CDs to try out. This was the first ever meeting of EGLUG. We had a go installing Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Edubuntu, plus SuSE and a couple of others.
