Notes from MonadLUG, 13-Mar-2008

[Ted Roche]

Twelve people attended the March meeting of the Monadnock Region Linux
User Group, MonadLUG, held as usual on the second Thursday of the month
at the SAU 1 offices on Hancock Road in Peterborough.

Charlie called the meeting to order at 7 PM and we had the usual round
of announcements. One member offered an HP LaserJet 4L and a new
cartridge to anyone interested. There's problems with the paper feeding,
likely the rollers, and he didn't have the inclination to fix it himself
and went out and bought a new duplexing laser. If anyone's interested,
we can try to get you in touch with him.

Philip Sbrogna was the main presenter, speaking on Wine. Philip works as
sysadmin for a local company, and has past
experience as a game software developer (as well as a nuclear power
operator, a past profession we share) and is very interested in getting
games working well under Linux. Wine Is Not an Emulator, but a API layer
that provides the resources Windows executables need to run under Linux.
The main page is at http://www.winehq.org and there's a lot of
information available there. Philip was running OpenSuse 10.x and
demonstrated how easy it was to use the built-in YAST tool to locate,
download and install a current and stable Wine release, version 0.9.42.
Despite having practiced it several times, things don't work the same
during a presentation, and Philip was great about rolling with the
punches and showing us how to configure, troubleshoot and tweak on Wine.
We talked about the commercial alternatives, CrossOver Office from
CodeWeavers and Cedega's work with getting high-end games working, the
Application Database at WineHQ where you can examine the list of
programs known to work or known to have limitations and pick up
suggestions on how to tune the application to your needs.

Ken got a chance to show off the new facilities of the meeting room. A 
new hi-tech podium's in place that supports two projector screens, one 
of which is a touch-screen, dry-erase screen. The project supports 
computer video, TV tuner, DVD, videotape and a color video camera that 
can scan and preserve on memory cards,a 21st century opaque projector. 
Beautiful equipment! It may take us a while to learn the magic X 
configuration to get it working, so be prepared for a little struggling 
at the beginning of the meetings.

Next month, Guy Pardoe will demonstrate Joomla 1.5, the newly-released
(and significantly re-engineered) content management system written in
PHP. There's a book on Joomla 1.5, written by Barrie North, who's spoken
at the Dartmouth - Lake Sunapee Linux User Group. It's published by
Prentice Hall PTR, an imprint of Pearson Education. Attendees to the
recent CentraLUG meeting may recall we had a copy raffled away.

Thanks to Philip for a great presentation, to Ken for providing the
space and facilities, to Charlie Farinella for organizing, promoting and
moderating the evening, and to all for attending and participating!