[NMLUG] LVLUG meeting a success

[brians.outfit at gmail.com (Brian Rodgers)]

February 12, 2006
Good morning fellow LVLUG members.
Friday's LV Linux Users Group meeting was a success in part because of
donations by Wesley  of very valuable computer parts. One project
which we worked on was installing and updating a newsgroup reader
called Pan into Jonathan's Slackware 10.2 computer. After installing
the program the PC was running terribly slow. The hundreds of
newsgroups listings downloaded pretty well, but the headers were
taking forever to display or download. Wes added one gig of memory to
the PC and blammo it came to life like never before. Very cool. This
is an aspect to a Linux Users group I had not considered. I thought we
would be solving software issues with Linux. Now I can see that
hardware can make a huge difference too. Thank you Wesley.

We also worked extensively with software installations and
partitioning of drives. Our main Linux gurus were unable to attend so
some issues will need to wait until next the meeting. Most of us
newbies have issues with basic package  installation which appears to
be different depending on the distro of Linux. For instance I want to
install a second distro on my office PC. Lee helped me get the latest
distro of Mepis. No problem there. Nowhere in Slackware 10.2 could we
find a GUI CD burning package. Frustrating to say the least. I looked
at the switches associated with the command line, cdrecord. Jiminy
Crickets! Too many options and I gave up. Call me a Windows wimp, but
I'd been working on computers all day long and was tired. I just
wanted to click on something to burn the CD. Unable to successfully
install the standard CD burning package we were pretty frustrated.
Next I will add one of the 80 gig drives Wes gave us and install Mepis
on it. At the same time I have a Nvidia card to install so I can get
my graphics up to steam too.

So with my complete lack of understanding installing packages in
Slackware I think running Mepis for my office PC sounds better and
easier. One of my issues in the office is networking. We have a
Lexmark Optra T610 Tcp/IP printer. Mepis has the drivers preinstalled.
After fiddling around with the print manager GUI  Lee and I had it
printing  perfectly on another PC running Mepis. So, until I can get
the basics to installing packages clearly posted into my head I need
to have Linux work in the office. At the moment Slackware is printing
to the network printer through Mepis.  The Mepis PC is slated to take
over for this Windows Me PC here at the ranch. The sooner I get the
office printing and doing all of the things an office PC needs to do
the sooner I can bring the new Mepis PC home.

There it is.
Sincerely,
Brian Rodgers