Spring 2018

 Meetings  No Responses »
Apr 162018
 

NMGLUG is meeting at The New Baking Company on Cordova Road. They have re-opened in the same location as before. We are informal,  but try to assemble by 5:30 P.M. so that we have some time before 7 P.M. closing to tutor or do an installation or upgrade. There is WiFi at the Baking Company. They have remodeled, so it is cleaner and brighter. There is no longer a public computer and the WiFi is managed by another party, as the new ownership found that more convenient for them. We can assist with logging in as the process is a little murky.

Recent club work has included some up-grades and installs, at meetings and at other times. Members can be available sometimes for help at other hours. There is a growing number of non-club members using mostly Ubuntu variants now. We have helped them to  install and use Free Software as an alternative to other computer operating systems. Of course, Linux and Debian based systems can support, and keep current, a variety of older hardware. Please contact us if you need some help for your computing upgrade to Free Software, as in license and at no cost, and a community of support spanning the globe!

Libre Tea Computer Card. Show your support!

 Meetings  No Responses »
Aug 222016
 

Only a few days left to pledge support and pre-order!!

eoma-micro-card_jpg_project-body

The Earth-friendly EOMA68 Computing Devices project is a crowdfunding campaign run on Crowd Supply to produce a line of hardware products that are ecologically responsible, and built based on royalty-free, unencumbered hardware standards.

They write:

“Now imagine if you owned a computing device that you could easily fix yourself and inexpensively upgrade as needed. So, instead of having to shell out for a completely new computer, you could simply spend around US$50 to upgrade — which, by the way, you could easily do in SECONDS, by pushing a button on the side of your device and just popping in a new computer card. Doesn’t that sound like the way it should be?”

—
https://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/support-the-libre-tea-computer-card-a-candidate-for-respects-your-freedom-certification

https://www.crowdsupply.com/eoma68/micro-desktop

 Posted by at 2:36 pm

Meeting location – winter 2015

 Meetings  No Responses »
Feb 102015
 

NMGLugers, I have edited the recurring meeting location to the Whole Foods St. Francis (meeting space on Cordova) location. This seems to make more sense that using the Santa Fe Baking Co.. We meet at the Whole Foods location this week and we can discuss this further. Thank you. Ted P.

Update: We seem to have stably (for now at least) settled on Warehouse 21 upstairs in the Media Lab. – Arlo James Barnes, October 2015

Our meeting location

 News  No Responses »
Nov 072014
 

NMGLugers, We met at the 2nd Street Brewery on the 6th of November, as the Santa Fe Baking Company has changed their hours and closes at 5 p.m. The Brewery was noisy and crowded during the 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. dinner hour. Food and beverages were good enough, of course.

There were a few discussions of alternatives which might be better for conversation, quieter and having ample resources like power outlets and elbow room.

Shall we use the mailing list to come make a choice for the next meeting?

Thank you.

DVD iso burning

 Software - OS  No Responses »
Oct 012014
 

I have assembled a desktop box with internal dvd burner and will test it soon for burning iso’s. I’ve done this because I had so much trouble burning dvd’s with my one laptop with a dvd burner. It was an older model and not perhaps up to all the current standards.
Now I have a 200 w powered desktop and a new dvd burner. Incidentally the 32-bit laptop, with beefed up ram was able to download and burn the OS for the 64-bit desktop.
I have been reminded that we are a GNU Linux group and so should focus only on GNU software and the Four Freedoms. I agree, this is even more important than ever. Perhaps we can talk about this at the next NMGLug meeting. See you there.

The Origami Gnu

 Meetings  1 Response »
Sep 212014
 

This is a photo of the origami gnu-like model I took to the “Money-less Yard Sale on September 6th. I may try another with horns curling upwards as in the GNU logo.  Ted P.

origami gnu - well sort of.

origami gnu – well sort of.

Making dvd iso’s

 Meetings  No Responses »
Sep 202014
 

After the problems I had making good dvd’s of various iso’s I have acquired a desktop pc with 64 bit capacity. Just need to install an OS and get a good dvd internal burner.

Addendum 09-24-14: I have installed Xubuntu 14.04.1 (64 bit) and the machine runs well. I have two iso’s and will download more, adding Trisquel as recommended for new users. The dvd burner just arrived and I will install it soon. I will let the group know how it is going at our next meeting.

beaglebone black recovery

 Events, Hardware  3 Responses »
Nov 072013
 

Tonight we recovered a beagleboard! Many months ago we tried to install Debian and lost video and network access to the device. Obviously, U-Boot wasn’t able to boot the broken Debian install attempt.

beaglebone-black-serialWe attempted to re-flash using the SD card and that didn’t work. So, we thought it was broken at a deeper level and thought serial access would be helpful. A few meetings ago we attempted to build a serial cable that would interface with the BBB. We tried a standard rs232 serial cable and matched the pinout to the BBB board serial pins. Much continuity testing with a multimeter was required to match up pins. Yet, nothing we did worked. Then we realized that its not rs232 and is in fact TTL Serial (a description of the difference). Sam bought a TTL to USB controller and we used a ribbon cable and a breadboard to hook them up.
bbb-ftdi
Once we successfully connected to the BBB over serial we saw the BBB was outputting the character “C”. CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC…..
We asked on irc.freenode.net #beagle and the user magyarm told us that the C output means that the BBB can’t boot and all we need to do is re-flash the eMMC from a SD card. We previously had tried this and it didn’t work so the consensus was that we did it wrong. We retried the flashing of eMMC using the SD and we are happy to report a success!

We downloaded Robert Nelson’s Debian install image at http://elinux.org/BeagleBoardDebian#eMMC:_BeagleBone_Black

Then;

unxz BBB-eMMC-flasher-debian-7.2-2013-10-25.img.xz

dd if=BBB-eMMC-flasher-debian-7.2-2013-10-25.img of=/dev/sd[x] bs=1M

Then place the microSD in the BBB, hold down the boot button, apply power (use the power cord, because when flashing, the BBB consumes more power than the usb cable can provide), hold the boot button until the first LED comes on (this will boot from the microSD card). Wait for the bank of 4 LEDs to stop flashing and go solidly lit, it takes many minutes depending on the speed of your SD card. Once those 4 LEDs are solidly lit, the eMMC is flashed. Remove power, remove SD card and re-power on. It should now boot from internal eMMC!

Instead of blindly trying to flash, we had the serial output of the BBB and knew exactly what was going on the entire time! YAY! Instead of guessing whats going on.

Hardware options:
https://www.sparkfun.com/products/9717
https://www.adafruit.com/products/284
http://shrimping.it/blog/cp2102-kit/

 

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