NEXT MEETING: Wednesday, April 20th, 2005 at 7:00 pm
(Stepinac High School, 950 Mamaronack Ave, White Plains, NY)

The meeting on March 16th was in a different format. Joe Bruno opened with an account of the LinuxWorld Conference in Boston last month at the time of the our last meeting. He was surprised and gratified by the energy, enthusiasm, an informative displays and activities, unlike many of the recent computer conferences he has attended. He passed around a collection of magazine issues, CD's of various vendors' products, and workbooks from some of the tutorials.

The rest of the meeting was an open discussion led by John Moore to get an update on the background and interests of the dozen members present. John wanted this information to plan where to go with future presentations. Some interesting ideas were brought forth.

(l) Some members complained that Linux is not ready for prime time on the desktop as evidenced by the problems reported from the Installfest session. Although the latest distributions of Linux like SuSe, Fedora, Xandros, etc. install easily on newer hardware, they install only with difficulty or not at all on older machines, particularly laptops. This led to the suggestion by John to use older distributions contemporaneous with older hardware. The problem with the old distributions, however, is that they require user input to answer questions about the hardware that most users do not know. KNOPPIX can come to the rescue by identifying hardware. By observing what Knoppix finds and noting it down, one then has the answers to the puzzling questions the older installs ask. There was some talk of a session devoted to this process.

(2) Rich Nayman said that he uses Knoppix to troubleshoot many of the problems he encounters with his Windows clients. Forexample, a machine that will not boot can sometimes be booted with a Knoppix CD and from there he can gain access to the BIOS, for example, and sometimes bring the Windows machine to life. This was also suggested as a future presentation.

(3) Rich also told of a friend who uses Virtual PC to install multiple operating systems on his computer which, unlike with boot managers, can be multitasked without re-booting. It was suggested from the floor that VMware will do the same. In reply to comments that VMware on Windows left something to be desired, somewone remarked that VMware on Linux is far more satisfactory.

John urged everyone to let him know what issues they would like to see presented in future meetings. Contact John at john@lionswing.net or Joe Bruno at linuxWPCUG@aol.com or your Webmaster at alicamp@optonline.net.

For directions to the school click on the map above. For other news, check out the WPCUG site at:

www.wpcug.org
Webmasters: Campbell/Moody Software alicamp@optonline.net
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