Does anyone have anything they would like to present related to Open Source software or Linux software? Presentations don't have to be long affairs, even 15-20 minutes on your favorite Linux distro, technology, program or even some new gadget you have are welcomed. Android is based on Linux as well, so if you have a new Android phone or tablet you'd like to discuss, that'd be great.
I do have a couple of topics I'm bouncing around my head but I don't expect either to take up the full amount of time. So if somebody else has something else they'd like to do, let us know by this Sunday (March 25th) here or message Brian (cod3poet), Bill (ssfc72) or me.
Thanks!
I could demo openSUSE Tumbleweed, as I have downloaded and tried it (Plasma version). But I just did a distro demo last month, so if you have other offers, go with those.
I have only beginners knowledge on 2 topics, but I could do a quick talk on both.
1. a usb GPS dongle running on Mint 18.3
2. The motion detecting software called Motion with a usb webcam, running on a raspberry PI 3.
Bill
I can do what I'd expect to be a brief presentation on the cross-platform Mailspring email client. It's pretty easy to use but I'm guessing not many members have seen it.
I'm also checking out PureOS, a security-enhanced Debian derivative distribution created by the people who make the security-enhanced Librem notebooks and phones.
I'm happy to see Bill and Jason present next week, and I can hold openSUSE Tumbleweed until we need another presentation. I would be particularly interested to hear about PureOS because I've heard a lot about Librem, and it sounds like what they're doing is analogous to what System76 did in putting together Pop!_OS (except that Librem has this extra security feature).
My vote is for PureOS and the Pi Demo for sure as long as Bill / Jason are up for it? if so send me your blurbs and I will get it posted to the facebook / website :)
Quote from: cod3poet on March 23, 2018, 11:40:58 AM
My vote is for PureOS and the Pi Demo for sure as long as Bill / Jason are up for it? if so send me your blurbs and I will get it posted to the facebook / website :)
I'm game. I will you get a blurb this weekend.
I have a new topic that I think would interest the members in the future - how to spin a custom live image (say, your existing configuration) with remaster.sys. I just watched a Linux Journal video (https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/5-minute-foss-spinning-custom-linux-distribution) on how to do it, and it looks pretty easy. Maybe a member other than me would like to take this on as a future presentation?
That sounds really cool, Mike.
After some discussion with Jason and Bill we decided to move the meeting to the 9th rather than the 2nd as would regularly be the case. Easter Monday and all.
No bunnies were harmed in the planned move of this meeting.
I think that's a good move, but unfortunately I'll be in the States then and won't be able to attend. Too bad; I was looking forward to this meeting :(
Oh that sucks, Mike. I hope you can make the May meeting.
The PLUG meeting has been rescheduled for April 16th, 2018 since April 2nd is Easter Monday and the following Monday wasn't available. Same place, same time. Brian will be putting out an announcement with the details at least a week before the meeting.
Maybe we should just cancel the April meeting. It would only be a few weeks more, until the May meeting and we would save the $25 cost of the room rental.
I'd still favour having a meeting but Brian should decide.
I agree with Jason. We don't have that many meetings in a year. Perhaps this might be an opportunity to try having the meeting at the game place (?)
I also checked the calendar and the May meeting will still be three weeks after the April meeting.
I might be able to attend the April meeting with the change. Depends on when the armadillo infestation is cleared off the campground road. Florida is notorious for this of course, and a cool spring seems to make it worse.
The monthly meeting won't be until a week from tonight (Monday, April 16th), just for clarification. I expect there will be a MUG tomorrow night at e-Retro Sports Bar.
The weather forecast for Monday's PLUG meeting is not looking that good. There may be rain/snow occurring.
If the weather does turn bad, I will have to do my Raspberry Pi usb webcam Motion dectecting demo, at the May meeting because I don't expect to drive in from Lindsay, when the weather is not that good.
Bill
I think everybody will understand if you can't make it, Bill, though you will certainly be missed. Let's hope the weather turns out better than forecast.
Harry, did you say armadillos? Seriously? ;D
If Bill can't make it and Jason doesn't have enough to cover the full meeting, I could pinch hit with a brief demo of openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE version).
Quote from: fox on April 12, 2018, 07:07:44 PM
If Bill can't make it and Jason doesn't have enough to cover the full meeting, I could pinch hit with a brief demo of openSUSE Tumbleweed (KDE version).
Sounds good to me!
"Harry, did you say armadillos? Seriously? ;D"
I am certainly not in the habit of fabricating stories in the face of established scientific fact. And one armadillo is fine, but hundreds of them can be quite intimidating, especially when they all turn and look at you and you don't know what they are planning.
Quote from: buster on April 12, 2018, 10:35:16 PM
"Harry, did you say armadillos? Seriously? ;D "
I am certainly not in the habit of fabricating stories in the face of established scientific fact. And one armadillo is fine, but hundreds of them can be quite intimidating, especially when they all turn and look at you and you don't know what they are planning.
Lol. Like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" but with Armadillos?
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on March 28, 2018, 07:54:32 AM
The PLUG meeting has been rescheduled for April 16th, 2018 since April 2nd is Easter Monday and the following Monday wasn't available. Same place, same time. Brian will be putting out an announcement with the details at least a week before the meeting.
.
Is this meeting going to happen ? I have seen no announcement or email.
Quote from: BrianP on April 13, 2018, 12:00:35 PM
Quote from: Jason Wallwork on March 28, 2018, 07:54:32 AM
The PLUG meeting has been rescheduled for April 16th, 2018 since April 2nd is Easter Monday and the following Monday wasn't available. Same place, same time. Brian will be putting out an announcement with the details at least a week before the meeting.
.
Is this meeting going to happen ? I have seen no announcement or email.
As far as I know, yes. The meeting room is booked and confirmed and we have at least one topic (mine). I'm not sure why it hasn't been posted yet.
Sick family, real estate drama, and work presentations. Excuses galore. Posting now.
At this meeting we will also be taking membership renewals. Membership, although voluntary, is encouraged. Membership fees cover our room rental costs and any surplus is used to treat members during the Christmas Pizza party. A membership is only $25 a year, a fee that hasn't changed since 2000. You can pay via cash or cheque (made out to PLUG). Membership also gives you the opportunity to review Linux-related or other computer books, and bragging rights.
I'm confused. I thought that the topic was going to be PureOS.
Jason changed the topic "After doing some research on PureOS, I discovered there really isn't much to it." so rather than something paper thin I am glad to see some KDE love. I much prefer QT To GTK+
That's exactly right. Remember we talked about this a couple of weeks ago at Timmy's, Fox? If Bill isn't able to make it and you want to discuss Tumbleweed, there will be lots of time, I expect.
I remember that you were experimenting with KDE, but not that you had proposed switching topics. At any rate, I'm happy to hear about KDE from you because it's a desktop I haven't played with all that much and I'm interested to see what you have learned. If I do end up demoing openSUSE Tumbleweed, I'll talk more about the distro than the desktop I tested it with (other than showing how one can customize KDE to look like gnome/Unity). As you know, I'm hooked on a vertical bar on the left side of the display in whatever desktop I use. :)
Quote from: cod3poet on April 13, 2018, 10:15:31 PM
.... I much prefer QT To GTK+
I don't really understand the difference, other than that KDE (and lxqt) use QT and gnome and Unity use GTK+. Maybe Jason can talk a bit about how these are used in desktops and the difference between them in his presentation? If not, maybe you can cover that in a future presentation?
Looking forward to the KDE desktop discussion. I installed OpenSuse with Gnome and later with KDE. Night and day. To me KDE is far easier and complete. And Suse KDE ran much faster. Could just be Suse's implementation. Like to hear about the experience of others.
In my case, I didn't try the gnome version of openSUSE (Tumbleweed). I purposely picked the KDE version because gnome is what I typically use. I have installed non-rolling release versions of openSUSE before, including KDE at least once, but never made an explicit comparison between KDE and gnome versions. However, I do have Ubuntu 17.10 installed on one of my computers with the KDE desktop added. In that one I have switched back and forth between Unity, gnome and KDE, and I haven't noticed any major differences in speed between them. What I did notice, however, is that the KDE version of network access often loses my wireless connection after waking from sleep and it can only be fixed with a reboot. Also, KDE does annoying things to gnome or Unity, asking for KDE wallet passwords when I'm not even running KDE. While I like the greater flexibility of KDE, I haven't found it all that intuitive or easy to use, and it doesn't have any obvious advantages over gnome or Unity for me. But I'm coming from the Mac world, and default KDE is set up more like Windows xp or 7, whereas gnome shell and Unity are set up more like OS X.
AFAIK, Qt and GTK+ are just the framework libraries that the appropriate apps are based including the default look of widgets, background libraries needed for talking to each other and the OS and peripherals and so on. I think other than the default look, you'd have to be an application developer to understand the difference. Probably anything you'd find about them would be terribly biased unless they're a develop that uses both and can really objectively talk about how certain things are better in one than in the other.
I also understand that GTK+ was written in C and qt in C++, though I learned this in the past and may be out-of-date info. Performance-wise, the C might edge out in performance and certainly smaller code but C++ would be easier to write in (unless you hate OOP languages). GTK was around before Gnome, as well, it was the toolkit used to create GIMP long before both Gnome and KDE. Not sure about GTK+.
Mike wrote: "KDE does annoying things to gnome or Unity, asking for KDE wallet passwords when I'm not even running KDE."
In my experience, installing multiple desktops on one install often leads to bizarre experiences. When the desktop wishes to do something, the whole family chimes in with suggestions about how to cook the meal. Clean Gnome or KDE seems better. 'Many cooks spoil the meal'. At least that's what my father said when he left the kitchen and turned on the football game. (Never got my mother's opinion.)
So far, this has only been my experience with KDE. I have installed Budgie and Openbox in other Ubuntu installations and up until now, I've always installed gnome on top of Unity. None of these combinations have ever caused me a problem. But the reason could be that Unity, gnome and Budgie all use gnome-shell, or at least elements of gnome in the case of Budgie, and Openbox is a window manager, not a full desktop environment.
If we continue with the KDE theme in June, someone might like to do a demo of Neptune 5.0, which gets a fair but not super review on Distrowatch. Primarily this distro uses KDE.
https://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20180416#neptune
Thanks for the suggestion, Buster. I would certainly like to do KDE Plasma 5 in May. And I hadn't heard of this distro before. I'll look into it.