All posts by Julian Robbins

events, Meetings, OS, Training

Software Freedom Day Event in Hereford Sat 19th September 2015

web-banner-chat-we-re-organizing-hHerefordshire LUG will be holding another Software Freedom Day free event as part of the worldwide SFD celebrations.

Please come along to All Saints Church in the centre of Hereford to find out more.

We will have demonstrations and information on many Open Source and Linux topics including the Raspberry Pi found increasing in Primary and Secondary schools across the country and beyond.

Find out more about high quality free software that you can use today, and that you are already using when web browsing or searching, using Facebook, Twitter etc.

For more details please see the poster

We’ll see you Saturday  … and tell your friends 😉

 

events, Meetings, OS, Training

Beginners Linux Event, Leominster, June 24th 2015

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On Wednesday 24th June at 7 pm for 7.30pm at the Education Room, Grange Court, Leominster, The Herefordshire Linux and Open Source User Group will host a special event on the topic of ‘Beginners Linux and how to choose a Linux Distro’. See below for full details of the event
thAmongst other topics, we will show you why you should consider using Linux , its benefits and idiosyncracies, and how you can stay virus free on the net. We will also show you how to install Linux on a pc live during the event. The event will be aimed at real beginners to Linux and Open Source, perhaps keen to move from Windows.

The entry is open to anyone not just LUG members and will be subject to a small charge, to cover the hire of the venue only.

Directions

Grange Court is only accessible from the Church Street entrance to Pinsley Road. There is no through road from the Etnam Street entrance, although this does not show on Google Maps or Satnavs.

For Satnav users, Grange Court’s postcode is HR6 8NL

There is car parking for up to 12 vehicles, and two disabled parking bays. Etnam Street car park and the large car park on Arkwright Close, both pay-and-display, are less than 5 minutes walk from Grange Court. More information about car parks in Leominster can be found here.

Public Transport

Leominster Station is a 5 minute walk from Grange Court. Trains are regular between Hereford and Shrewsbury. For fares and timetables, visit www.thetrainline.com or www.nationalrail.co.uk

We look forward to seeing you on the 24th June Continue reading Beginners Linux Event, Leominster, June 24th 2015 →

events, Meetings, OS, Posted, Questions!, Training

Survey results of what members want from our Meetings

Aside
surveyresultsIt’s taken a while but I’ve collated the results of our survey relating to topics that our members would like to see at our meetings.

​You will see that there is quite an interest in Beginners topics, choice of Distro, interest in Virtualisation, Desktop and Raspberry Pi, and Programming. Topics such as Gaming on Linux, Business applications, such as CRM/ERP and Graphics faired less well. There were a few extra topics requested which you can also see listed, such as a Troubleshooting session (sounds a good one), outreach and spreadsheets for finance.

As discussed at the last LUG Meeting we plan the first meeting based around these topics in June 24th, 4th Wednesday of the month as usual, probably to allow time to get organised. What seemed like a good plan at the meeting is to have a Beginners session that also includes Distro choice, ie why I should choose Ubuntu over Debian, Fedora or Arch for example.

In the end we had 17 responses altogether not too bad, although people were allowed to vote for as many topics as they wanted which seemed like the fairest method to use.

I will setup a Pirate pad (or equivalent) online pad where we can share our plans for this first meeting. There wasn’t consensus where we should hire a room and and have a full session, or just keep things simple and carry on at the Courtyard but please say your ideas on this .

We will also need people who are happy to talk about topics for Beginners, and structure the event. I’m happy to help coordinate, but it’s always best to get as many volunteers to help to reduce the load for the others.

We will also of course need to plan what other events for each month we will hold based around the interest shown above.

So please reply and let everyone know your thoughts, plans and ideas and/or if you want to help

Posted

Manjaro Linux – a refreshing change … ?

Manjaro_logo_and_name_white_backgroundI’ve been using Linux for a long time, since 1998 As far as I recall and seen many changes and popular distros come and go. I started with Redhat 5.2 in a boxed setup which had a whole manual to help you install it ..

After Linux Mandrake pushed boundaries in usability , installation, and becoming the Ubuntu Linux before Ubuntu ever existed. Sadly Mandrake lost its way a little and died before being resurrected as Mandriva and recently coming back more strongly as Mageio.

Instead I moved to Ubuntu on the second ever release back as Warty Warthrog, 4.10 , after always wanting an easy to use stable distro, that had the Debian base or upgrades far better than that offered by rpm based distros at the time.  I stuck with Ubuntu a long while, and stuck with Unity, but just found it wasn’t ideal for a work distro, but great for an absolute newcomers linux.

I moved to Linux Mint, which I still use at home, and like a lot apart from two things:

  1.  The change to only updating most packages far less frequently (In prefer to add ppa’s and get newer packages for a number of applications
  2.  I found that Cinnamon although a great Desktop, I still love, is just a bit  ……………………. slow …

I’d heard about the ‘Rolling release ‘ distros such as Arch and a few other flavours but they didn’t quite fit, or in Arch’s case, very interesting , blisteringly quick, but needing quite a bit of time to get setup and dangers in instability just when you don’t want them

I instead looked for an Arch clone as I like ‘the Arch way’, but preferred a slightly different route. There are others, but I preferred a non KDE distro which ruled out a couple of options and found myself downloading and trying out Manjaro off a Linux format disc in a VM. I was impressed ! So fast even in Live mode. packages far newer than in most distros without endless ppas required.  I tried the standard Manjaro iso first with XFCE, which I hadn’t tried for a few years but found it had really come on leaps and bounds and was missing very few touches that I had with cinnaman as part of Mint. For that matter there are community build versions of Manjaro with Cinnamon so you can have your cake and it. But so far I’ve stuck with the XFCe version, which is so fast, its like adding another couple of CPU’s to your pc.

Its still early days and I hope I don’t find any breakages which has happened to others on odd occasions, but as being a non newbie I can usually fix most systems if required.

There si a new major version coming up shortly 0.90 currently in prerelease 5 , which promises a lot, but as a rolling release I have it already, with my upgraded 0.8.12 version I installed a while back.

But don’t take my word for it , give it a try yourself … nothing to lose.

Julian

events, Meetings, Posted

September Meeting

Hi Everyone
After a few problems last month, just a quick note to say our September LUG meeting will be on Wednesday night at 7.30pm, usual place the Courtyard in Hereford on the mezzanine floor. Hope we can get a good number at the meeting on Wednesday night.
cryIf you have been on our list but haven’t attended a meeting yet, or you’ve been unable to attend for a while, we’d be very pleased to see you. The lift appears to be working too (the last time I checked a couple of weeks back).
The meeting will start at roughly 7:30pm as usual.
Items to discuss :-
  1. Herefordshire Linux / Open Source Event to take place instead of Software Freedom day.
    Need to decide a date, (November ??), what are we going to do, start the planning, venue (All Saints ??), etc, etc?
The Courtyard has free fast wifi and serves lovely coffees, and there is level access to all public areas of the building. You can find directions to The Courtyard, Edgar Street, Hereford, HR4 9JR here
The Courtyard has pay and display parking adjacent and free parking a short walk away.
I’ll see you all there on Wednesday.
Meetings, Posted

May Meeting – 28th May

Hi Everyone
Just a quick note to say our May HLUG meeting will be on Wednesday at 7.30pm, usual place the Courtyard in Hereford on the mezzanine floor.
If you have been on our list but haven’t attended a meeting yet, or you’ve been unable to attend for a while, we’d be very pleased to see you. Nice light evenings at the moment so a good time to come along.
The meeting will start at 7:30pm as usual.
Items to discuss :-

  1. OPEN SOURCE AND THE PROFESSIONAL AUDIO/VISUAL ENVIRONMENT EVENT – 18 JUNE 2014

    Room booked – need to discuss details in terms of organisation on the night and publicity to other groups.

  2. Possible Linux Bier Wanderung meet up, in Talybont on Usk –  July. I’ve emailed their group and they are happy for us to come down that Wednesday evening .
The Courtyard has free fast wifi and serves lovely coffees, and there is level access to all public areas of the building. You can find directions to The Courtyard, Edgar Street, Hereford, HR4 9JR here
The Courtyard has pay and display parking adjacent and free parking a short walk away.
I’ll see you all on Wednesday night.
Julian
Meetings

April Meeting – 23rd April 2014

2 Comments

Hi Everyone

Just a quick note to say our April LUG meeting will be tonight at 7.30pm, usual place the Courtyard in Hereford on the mezzanine floor.

If you have been on our list but haven’t attended a meeting yet, or you’ve been unable to attend for a while, we’d be very pleased to see you.

The meeting will start at 7:30pm as usual.

Items to discuss :-

  • New Special Event – Where’s best to book? I have some details on the Leominster Grange Court which for community groups is more affordable than previous places we have used or looked at.
  • New HLUG website – not many posts going on there. can we do som e training, or find out how we can get more people posting to it?

The Courtyard has free fast wifi and serves lovely coffees, and there is level access to all public areas of the building. You can find directions to The Courtyard, Edgar Street, Hereford, HR4 9JR here

http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/place?cid=8198539616210862916&q=courtyard&.

The Courtyard has pay and display parking adjacent and free parking a short walk away.
I’ll see you all there tonight.

Again, sorry for the short notice

OS, Posted

How to replace grub boot on newer distro after installing another linux (ubuntu based) os

Hi

I’m sure you’ve been in the situation (I have many times), where you install an os, use it for a while then move on to something better installing it to a new partition on the hard disk. After a while of trying it out you decide you wish to move to the new linux distro completely. But you still have the old grub boot set up, which will boot by default into the original distro. This is easily changed, but even then, its much better to have your main distro controlling grub allowing it to update when new kernel updates are made or if you upgrade your distro version.
This is a really easy guide for how to do it that takes you through it nice and gently  http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/245