This meeting has been canceled; John is too much under the weather.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month’s topic is Mint Linux, which has emerging as the favorite distribution in recent months for a couple of reasons:

1. It is very easy to install, because it contains all the non-free add-ons that most other distributions force you to add after installation. (It’s distributed via DVD to make room for everything.)

2. It has a very customizable desktop that many people prefer. If you don’t use KDE, then at the moment you have a choice between Gnome 3 and Ubuntu’s Unity, both of which are bad attempts at trying to make a 24″ screen look like a telephone.

I’ll have copies of the new Mint 12 DVD at tonight’s meeting if you’d like to give it a try.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This meeting is cancelled. We’ll see you in December.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month’s meeting of the Linux SIG will be on Tuesday the 11th at the usual time and place — 8109 Greenslope, 6 PM informal and 7 PM presentation. Coffee and snacks will be available.

This month I’m going to talk about free tools for image processing, with particular emphasis on Gimp and Image Magick, which are about as far apart in concept as any two programs can be.

I’ll also briefly talk about the Austin Public Library’s new program for loaning e-books directly to your Kindle.

See you Tuesday.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month I’d like to talk about shell utilities to make particular jobs easier, such as grep, locate, find, rename, sort, sed, and awk.

Since many of these use regular expressions, a short RE tutorial will be included.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

One major thing to talk about this month: KDE 4.7 is out, and I truly feel that KDE is more stable than the default Gnome/Unity interface provided by Ubuntu. (Remember when KDE was switching from 3.x to 4.0? Well, that’s how I feel about the switch from Gnome 2.x to 3.0, with or without Unity. I’d seriously recommend waiting for 11.11 or even 12.04 if you dislike KDE, or perhaps give XFCE (Xubuntu) a try. As I’ll demonstrate, KDE 4.7 is a trivial update to Ubuntu 11.04 (but not earlier versions), and it’ll be standard on 11.11 Kubuntu.

My one-line description of the difference is that KDE looks like a computer desktop, and Unity tries to make my 24″ monitor look like a telephone.

See you Tuesday.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month I’m going to talk about “light” versions of Linux that (a) install and run on older and/or smaller hardware, and (b) run faster on any hardware.

In particular, I’ll demonstrate the newest Mint LXDE and Xubuntu releases. Both should install and run in 256M of memory and take about 3GB of hard drive, so if you have any older hardware that’s been having problems with Linux (you know who I mean — hint, hint), I’ll have installation disks available so you can give one or the other a try.

The lightweight graphical manager (no Gnome or KDE here!) has a slight learning curve, but ANYTHING that runs on the “heavyweights” will also run on the lightweights.

See you Tuesday.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month’s meeting will concentrate, to nobody’s surprise, on the new Ubuntu 11.04 release, aka Natty Narwhal. I’ve installed the KDE variety on all three of our machines without incident.

One of the things i’ll talk about is the easy way to switch Ubuntu’s new Unity interface (which despite appearances, still runs under Gnome) back to the “classic” Gnome 2.6 interface. Note this is ONLY for 11.04; current plans for 11.10 are to provide Unity-only.

Like any change, half the people hate Unity because it’s different, and half love it. Personally I think it’s depressing that even Linux folks would be so inflexible as to reject something because they might have to spend a couple of days getting used to it. You wonder why they ever left Windows.

Anyway, see you tomorrow.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

…
I do have Beta 1 of the new Ubuntu 11.04 (aka Natty) ready to show off, though. I like the KDE version, although the jury is still out on the new Unity interface which is now the default replacing Gnome.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc

This month’s topic is “The Times, They Are A’Changin”. If you are a user of
Ubuntu, you’re not going to recognize version 11.04 (Natty), now seven weeks
from launch. The Gnome desktop people are finally releasing Gnome 3, but to
be honest, it looks like they have missed the bus. The reviews I’ve seen say
that, despite all the hoopla, it isn’t that much different from Gnome 2 (the
current default for Ubuntu and many other distributions), and what changes
there are aren’t necessarily for the better. We shall see.

In any case, for 11.04 Ubuntu has dumped the Gnome 3 desktop for its own Unity
desktop, which has a very different look and feel. Unity was already the
default for the Netbook version of Ubuntu in 10.10, and for Natty it becomes
the default for everything. (Gnome 2.3 will still be in the repositories if
you want to install it; I’m not sure about Gnome 3.0. The KDE desktop will
still be available, of course.)

I’ve got Alpha 3 of Natty ready to demonstrate at the meeting, and I MIGHT be
able to show Gnome 3 as well. (Allegedly there’s a live beta of SuSE which
has it, but I haven’t downloaded or tried it.) So please come by on Tuesday
and see the future in action.

See the Linux Beginners SIG page for location, contacts, etc