Meetup

The Leiden Anglophone Linux User Group now has a Meetup.

Well, more to the point, I’ve filled in a bunch of information and paid a little money for a six-month trial and we’ll see how it goes.

Having blown it for March, we’ll try again for first Wednesdays. Now that I’ve specified it as such in a public place, I’ll have to follow through.

Hope to see you there!

Sparky!

I successfully installed SparkyLinux, chosen almost at random from a recent list of lightweight distros I found after that Mint scare of a couple weeks ago.

The installer worked well enough – I’m still a little confused on GRUB and ended up adding Sparky to the Windows boot controller rather than putting the Linux bootloader at the top of the food chain. The tool for that required about three minutes and fewer than five clicks. Can’t complain really.

Sparky’s pleasant to look at and easy to navigate. The only package I’ve installed so far is Dropbox. There was a hiccup in the install process – about 50% of the files were downloaded by the installer and then it hung – but when I tried the next day, it was fine.

LibreOffice loads up very quickly, the boot process is also very swift. The default browser, Iceweasel (a Firefox derivative, I think) works well enough. I haven’t delved into other goodies like distraction-free editors and the like, but I’m generally happy.

Next thing to figure out is how to extend the display rather than duplicate it.

Mint! Almost.

So I’ve decided, after about three years to turn my nice little Win 8 laptop into a dual boot device. Deleted a bunch of stuff, defragged, created a nice unallocated partition in GParted.

I thought I’d go with my old standby CrunchBang, but Corenomial went out of the distro business about a year ago. One crew seems to have released something called CrunchBang Plus Plus, but their web site gives a lovely little 404.

Another crew called Bunsen Labs has picked up the Debian + Openbox combo. At the moment it’s in RC2 status. I’d hoped to run it as from a USB stick, but it’s not playing nice. I get to the option to play with it, but it goes into a loop with the menu asking which version you want to play with.

I think I decided to go with the Cinnamon variation of Linux Mint. Booted into it from a stick and added Skype, wished my mom a happy birthday, and then saw this blog entry:

Beware of hacked ISOs if you downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th!

Great. Mint was hacked. I downloaded mine on the 21st, but am still wary. Not sure what I’ll install when I get to it.

 

 

 

 

Leiden Anglophone Linux User Group Rides Again

We’ll be meeting on Thursday 11 February at Quartier Latin in Leiden. Join us?

(My apologies for the spam that took over this page. I do hope a changed password and a lot of deletion has fixed things.)

Final LALUG Meeting of 2012

Thanks to all who joined for our meeting two weeks ago at Gaanderij. Great food, great conversation, but a little pricey for what I’ve been trying to do with this group.

My thought for the final meeting of 2012 is to gather at Quartier Latin, a lovely looking little wine bar directly across Nieuwstraat from Gaanderij. It was not busy last week and my hope is that it isn’t (yet!) taking a huge leap in popularity.

I’ll be there from 7 or so on Thursday evening 13 December, 2012.

Hope to see you there!

Good meeting last night

Seven folks showed up (Marie, David, George, Terry, Sytze, Chris, and yours truly) to the slightly posher-than-I-expected Gaanderij restaurant for discussions of various and sundry things. David has been having some adventures with migrating a client’s very large web site to Amazon S3.

Sytze shared his new Galaxy Tab which is very sweet.

While I had done a little playing with Haiku before we met, the venue wasn’t such that I was comfortable firing up the laptop to show it off.

We were also quite amused by the description of the venue’s crème brûlée as it contained tonka beans. While many of us enjoy cooking, none of us knew what tonka beans were. Tasty and banned as a foodstuff in the US.

Meeting place tonight changed

De Branderij was booked out, so we’ll be meeting at their sister restaurant around the corner:

De Gaanderij
nieuwstraat 32
1312 KC Leiden
071-5142158

The reservation is in my name and the time is 7:30 as usual.

If you’ve used the Raspberry Pi and have tips or tricks, bring them along.

Cheers!

~Joe

And we’re doing it again…

I’ve been rather busy of late, but we restarted the Leiden Anglophone Linux Group a few weeks ago with quite a successful meeting. A new member with GRUB issues on Ubuntu found us via the Leiden Expats Facebook page and David was able to diagnose and fix them without a problem.

Last week’s meeting was a little smaller and the other three participants had all worked together. We didn’t end up discussing Linux much.

My plan is to have two more meetings before the end of the year. The next one will be Thursday 29 November. Steven recommended a place near Hooglandsekerk that looked quite hospitable.

De Branderij
Middelweg 7-9
2312 KE Leiden
071-5133728

Has anyone tried the Haiku OS of late? Techmonks has posted instructions for installing the latest version to a disk partition here. I’ve not tried it yet, but am going to try it in a VM this weekend. I like the idea of a non-Linux open source operating system almost as much as I like Linux.

Pi!

I pretty much missed out both on Pi day (3/14 in US reckoning). I did, however, enjoy a very nice apricot crumble at Bennies in Leiden.

I’ve also, so far, missed out on the Raspberry Pi. I haven’t tried very hard to get one, and figure once all the hoo-ha dies down a bit, they’ll be easier to come by.

That said, there is a very cool set of pix over on Flickr including one of the Raspberry Pi running an Atari emulator.

FOSDEM participant

At last night’s LALUG gathering, Finne Boonen spoke about her presentation at this year’s FOSDEM. Her research examines open source projects that have contributions from both paid staff and volunteers.

Alas, I’ve not had a chance to watch, but you can see her presentation here:
http://mirror.geeksoc.org/fosdem/2012/maintracks/k.1.105/Caret_and_Stick.webm