[brlug-newbies] May 7th Linux Desktop SIG Workshop

[edslinuxbox at cox.net]

Greetings All, 

The Linux Day Open House was a huge success, especially considering the severe weather that we had Friday nite and Saturday morning. We had about 40 people that registered for the open house and I think the event resulted in 4 new Clickers memberships and a significant number of new members to the Linux Desktop Special Interest Group. We gave away 9 copies of Xandros Home Edition and 2 copies of Xandros Desktop 4 Professional. Thanks to Xandros Corporation for donating these excellent door prizes. Thanks to everyone that helped with this great event and a special thanks to Larry for coming up with the idea and to Ms. Marie for baking the excellent home made sheet cakes for refreshments.

The next SIG workshop will be held on Monday May 7th, 2007 at 6 PM in the Computer Lab. This workshop will be an InstallFest to help the new SIG members get Xandros installed on their computer and to address any installation issues, both operating system, software and hardware, that anyone may have. To have Linux installed, bring just "the box". We don't need your mouse, keyboard or monitor. If you wish to continue to use Windows along with Linux, prior to the InstallFest, you will need to boot into Windows Safe Mode and run both scandisk and defrag. If you have time, run them both several times. We also recommend that you back up your Windows installation prior to the InstallFest. If you don't know how to do this, we can help you with it during the InstallFest, but please let us know early that you need this done as it takes additional time. If you want a DVD copy of your Windows installation, please bring sufficient blank DVD+R disks with you.

 Xandros, along with many other desktop distributions, has optioned to only offer the latest version of their Open Circulation Edition as a DVD ISO. The commercial versions continue to be offered on CD media. This means that if you don't have a DVD drive in your machine, you can not install the latest version of the Open Circulation Edition. If you don't have a DVD drive, we will help you install version 3.0.2 of the Open Circulation Edition. If you wish to add a DVD ROM/RW drive to your machine, pick one up and we will help you install it along with the Linux installation.

The Xandros 4.1 Open Circulation Edition has not yet been formally released, but they let the forum moderators download a pre-release copy, which is what we will be using for the InstallFest. If you wish to have a copy, bring a blank DVD+R disk with you in exchange for a burned copy with a nice customized label, in a disk sleve. I will have 10 copies available.

There will also be 10 copies of the Xandros 3.0.2 Open Circulation Edition available. If you want one of those, bring a blank CD-R to exchange for it.

If you wish to install a version of Linux other than Xandros, please download the ISO, burn it to the appropriate media and bring it with you. You can browse the many various Linux distributions that are available at Distro Watch.

http://distrowatch.com

Veteran SIG members are encouraged to come and help us with the InstallFest. I look forward to seeing everyone at the InstallFest.

Ed Richards