September 15th, 2022:
NMGLUG members gathered in person at Violet Crown, 1606 Alcaldesa St, Santa Fe. It is in the Santa Fe Railyard, very near the water tower landmark. There were five members present: Art, Geoff, Jason, Mark and Ted. Art brought his “new” Lenovo Thinkpad x280. He had successfully installed LinuxMint 21, so we had no work to do there. Several of us discussed the advantages of LinuxMint, Ubuntu and Debian as an introductory OS. Community on-line support and longevity of support are important to the new user, so that they can learn how to identify and then solve issues with the help of the Internet community. Ubuntu has a well developed website with a diversity of topics covered and some community sites beyond the official one. LinuxMint is non-corporate, but has good support and web presence currently. However, it is still mainly the work of one developer. Debian has a very good website, a large community and has a breadth of options for live and install iso’s available. I use Debian at home, but still install either LinuxMint or Xubuntu for new users, though that may change in the future as Debian allows tweaks to the system to permit some non-free libs and codexes to allow use of more hardware and commercial media. I am afraid we are in a hybridized state with freedom and copyright issues swirling around control of the digital world and the User’s general expectations.
The biggest amusement at the meeting was connecting to the wifi at Violet Crown. I was using Debian 11, 32 bit on an old Asus Eee. I connected on second try, perhaps because I was distracted for a moment and that allowed whatever authentication process to work. Others had to make several attempts, too. We were connecting to the VCSF-guest access and the theater provides the password at the concession desk. By the way there is food and a variety of beverages. Food is good and beverages to many tastes. I had raspberry iced tea which was very sweet, but went well with the chicken flautas. After connecting several members explored the speed and utility of the connection. Video worked for those with better machines than mine, and other checks seemed to work. As we were not doing an install, a real test will have to be tried another day. Downloading packages may or may not be as smooth.
Some interest was added when Jason introduced us to etherape, a graphical display of network traffic and showing some simple use cases of wireshark. We tried to get a variety of uses to display – so members used different websites to show print, video or other types of traffic among ourselves.
We had plenty of space and reasonable noise level so we could talk across tables. Our group could have been twice as big with no seating or working problem. This day and time for meeting seems good.
I did also connect to the virtual meeting, one other member was there. Due to my 32 bit system the best we could do was use the chat. That was clear, but we concluded it was better for me to say “Hello” to all and then focus on those at the table. So hybridizing meetings is questionable, but a possibility.
Sep 202022