Notes from CentraLUG, 1 December 2008

[Ted Roche]

{Contoocook got its power back this morning, at 0015 EDT}

Five members attended the December meeting of the Central New Hampshire
Linux User Group, one chapter of the Greater New Hampshire Linux User
Group, held as usual on the New Hampshire Technical Institute Library
Room 146. (Note that there will not be a January meeting at NHTI, as the
facility will be on break.)

A good time was had by all. We discussed and demonstrated the new Fedora
10, released on 25-November [1]. Attendees were impressed with the depth
and breadth of the Network Manager[2], version 0.7.0. We reviewed the
dialogs with configuration for wireless, wired, broadband mobile (cell),
DSL and VPN configurations. Bill Sconce did some Googling and reported
that Network Manager, the application, was available for several other
desktop managers, including his favorite, Fluxbox.

We also admired the updated "Monitor Resolution Settings" available off
the System|Preferences|Hardware|Screen Resolution GNOME menu. In
combination with the latest X.org, the interface gave us the ability to
detect the projector and adjust the laptop's screen display and arrange
the geometry of the two outputs, either mirroring them or placing them
side-by-side or top-to-bottom. Very slick!

We talked about the ease of upgrade: I had Fedora 9 installed on this
laptop and used the Fedora-supplied "preupgrade" package to stage the
laptop and perform the upgrade very easily. A restart into the new
kernel and confirmation that the /etc/fedora-release version was
correct, and I was upgraded! I have never seen an easier upgrade in a
RedHat-family-based system.

We discussed the challenges in digging up solutions to more complex
troubleshooting problems, not Fedora 10 related. Mark talked about a
problem it took him months to track down that eventually pointed to
remarking out a single module in rc.d. Dave referred us to A.P.
Lawrence.com [3] where he was able to come up with the magical
incantation to correct the timezone settings on an SCO box.

Meanwhile, back at Fedora 10, we looked at the new OpenOffice.org 3.0
and talked about some of the compelling features in the new version. The
ability to edit PDF files was something that generated a lot of
interest. Bill pointed out that there is no concept of text flow within
a PDF, so while you can correct a typo, you can't expect the text to be
reflowed.

There were questions on OO.o compatibility with other office packages,
like MSOffice and WordPerfect. Novell has come out with a translator to
read Office-BASIC macros and translate them into OpenOffice.org's
StarBASIC. Version 3.0 can apparently read the new proprietary Office
DOCX documents. We talked about where to find good resources for
OpenOffice.org (suggestions welcomed!). Bill mentioned that Jim
Kuzdrall's presentation on OpenOffice.org styles (see [4], Sept 20, 2007
for links to notes and slides) was a real help in him getting
OpenOffice.org working. We also mentioned that Solveig Haugland's blog
[5] was a great resource for more information.

Thanks to Bill Sconce for bringing the projector, to all for
participating and to the New Hampshire Technical Library for the great
facilities. Note that there is no January meeting planned at the moment,
but keep an eye out for a February announcement.

[1] http://docs.fedoraproject.org/release-notes/f10/en_US/
[2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Tools/NetworkManager
[3] http://aplawrence.com/OSR5/timezone.html
[4] http://wiki.gnhlug.org/twiki2/bin/view/Www/PastEvents
[5] http://openoffice.blogs.com

-- 

Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com