I arrived at ITT Tech just before noon with John standing by at the north door of the building. Seems like I'll find or create a better map. The one on the Henderson web site leaves out some detail needed if your not familiar with the area.

John hauled in the LVLUG cart and box of equipment we use for our meetings, but LAB 6 had practically everything needed for the meeting, including a projector all set up and ready to go. So only the router, one hub and a few cables were used.

I gave my 'Linux Easy Auto Backup' presentation with a handout. I hope it imparted Linux information on some of the tools and techniques available, but probably snowed most of the folks at the meeting. I'll put the presentation and a detailed description on the lvlug.org later this week for those that didn't make it to the meeting and as a refresher for those that saw it. I hope by my untrained example that others that have something to share try their hand at giving a presentation for a meeting.

There were 17 people that I know of for sure even though the sign in sheet doesn't show it. At least 6 were first time attendees. JR contributed $5 to the equipment fund even though I didn't put out the equipment tip jar. After subtracting the $13 I spent for name tag stickers and adding in JR's $5 our $80 equipment fund is now at $72. I put attendance sheet and 2 pictures I took at the meeting in the xcGallery on lvlug.org.

It's still surprises me with the mix of people we have and their Linux skill levels of how much help there is amongst us. I was hopping around helping quite a few people with even newbies working together and being able to show them some help on setting up and running, apt and synaptic. Surprise by them on how much easier it was to use maintenance tools designed for installing applications instead of trying to manually install them. I usually try to get around to talking to as many people as possible, but today I barely had enough time to see half the people at the meeting. Guess the presentation took away some of my visiting time.

The goal is to have LVLUG meetings on the third weekend of the month to avoid some of the holiday crunch at the end of the year. As I have mentioned before for those that work both days of the weekend, get 4 others together and I'll bring the equipment over to hold a meeting during the week. We are flexible, give some input to these plans. The next meeting is on Saturday April 18, at the ITT Tech Las Vegas site.

Please pay attention to the lvlug.org home page for the latest, bestest, currentest meeting info.

Tom

After a little confusion as to the meeting room after a last minute grab by an ITT Tech class of our original room we convened in Theory Room 4. Not much difference in the rooms, but really I don't know because I was never in Theory Room 2.


Setting up was a somewhat confusing at first because of the limited power outlet locations. But we got power to everyone that needed it. Had some weird Internet connections to start off with. The weird part of the IP addresses we were getting for our router the started off with 269.xxx and not 192.168. It looks like an intermittent either-net connection was causing some of the problems.

We had 2 instructors from ITT Tech at our meeting, David Dewsnap who helped us setting up our equipment and supplying coffee for our group. George the the assistant Dean for ITT Tech came in to introduce himself and welcome us. He brought in sodas and chip snacks. Sorry George I didn't remember your last name. John Diebold who got us the new meeting sites at ITT Tech came in a little late after finishing a class he had. He worked with Victor most of the time giving him some help.

I worked with David trying to get Fedora 10 and Suse installed on his 40GB USB HD. Of course all of the previous problems he had installing those distros on his own systems he had with my laptop. So it looks like I was zero help there.


As you can see from the 'Attendance' sheet, in the xcGallery on lvlug.org, we had 4 first time people at this meeting. It only shows 12 people that signed in, but there were a few that didn't.

Mark was looking for some help about SSH into remote systems. Of course when I went to show him how I connect to lvlug.org via SSH-VNC. I couldn't get in because because I changed my distro on my laptop and lvlug.org said it wasn't recognized.

I had $14 in the equipment tip jar at the end of the meeting that I announced. Well John's wife offered to contribute after that, but I said no thanks it could wait until next month. Then Mark threw in $5 and John's wife said if he could put money in then she could too. So when one of John's children put in some money the other children did too. We ended up with $28 dollars by the time they got done. Now the tip jar is at $80. Not bad for getting money in the tip jar that I wasn't even planning on putting out for the meeting. Thanks to all that contributed. Maybe we'll get some pizza for a future meeting unless someone can think of any new equipment we might need.

Over all it looks like ITT Tech will work out very well for future LVLUG meetings. It gives us a flexible venue because of 2 spread apart locations in the valley and the ability change some of our meetings to Sundays for those that work on Saturdays. So to use our 'flex' the next LVLUG meeting is scheduled for Sunday March 22 at the Henderson location. This is the opportunity for all you people that live on the east side of the valley and/or work on Saturdays to make it to a LVLUG meeting. The next Sunday meeting will probably be at the ITT TECH Las Vegas site on June 20 if things go as planned, but you all know how that goes.


My goal is to have LVLUG meetings on the third weekend of the month to avoid some of the holiday crunch at the end of the year and avoid meeting conflicts with the Las Vegas PC Club sig group. We are flexible, give some input to these plans.

Please pay attention to the lvlug.org home page for the latest, bestest, currentest meeting info.

Tom

Seems like Judy at NV Energy screwed up the meeting schedule for the Wengert room and scheduled a garden club for 12:30 today. The guard said we were scheduled for 11am tomorrow (Sunday). I will find out what she did this week
when she's back at work. It's bad enough NV Energy (NVE) won't let us use their Internet access, but we had to meet in the parking lot because NVE wasn't smart enough to split the room with the divider after they screwed up the schedule. We will NOT be meeting January 25 according to the schedule at NVE.

It would have helped if I had been contacted about the schedule change, but that didn't happen.

Well with the 13 people that did show up we had our meeting in the NVE parking lot. Good thing the weather was nice. We did the usual introductions, without using name tags. Overall it was a pretty good meeting with most of the people that needed help getting it. Lots of writing was done as those needing help didn't have battery powered laptops available.

As for our problems with NVE, John a first time meeting comer thinks that he might be able to get 2 commercial meeting sites for our meetings. One is in Henderson and the other is on Buffalo in Las Vegas. Some of the possible
options are, Saturdays or Sundays and flexible meeting times to meet the needs of the LVLUG members. John should be on the mailing list soon to gives us more information. We will do our best to make our future meetings convenient for the most people possible.

Sorry I don't have more detailed information on John and the company he works for. ITT Tech?

Later - Tom

Got to NPC around 10:40 with Frank Vlamings waiting around to be let into the meeting room. Anyone can go to the main entrance, south of the Wangert Room door and push the button to ask the guard to electronically unlock the doors. Sometimes the guard won't unlock the the doors if you ask too early.

There are only 17 people that signed the attendance sheet even though there were a few more. The new 4 wheeled hand cart came in handy for at least 3 others for hauling in tube type video displays and non-laptop systems.

There was no formal presentation, so after showing a couple of youtube PC/MAC/Linux(girl) shorts we took Jeff's 7 year old system that he couldn't get Ubuntu install on at home and tried 2 different Ubuntu CD's. Neither one worked so after that we put in a Knoppix 5.1.1 CD and installed Debian. It seems that Ubuntu didn't have some old enough drivers for Jeff's system. It wasn't a pretty install. Then we installed LinuxMint in a second partition. After booting the Debian system even though we had a network connection the browser wouldn't work. After removing a wireless network card, a separate network card and using the MB ethernet connection net access started working. Mike was quite helpful with Jeff's system while I went around the room trying to get helpers connected with those needing help.

Val brought in a lugable system with the wrong(bad?) monitor so we hooked it up to the projector after unplugging the projector to get it going. It seems to have gotten hung-up by switching between Jeff's monitor and the projector.

Val was trying unsuccessfully to get VM going. I pointed him to the 'IRC.FREENODE.NET #LVLUG for online chat' to get some of Heath Petty's expertise. Also recommended that he replug his hard drives to be hda and hdc, not hdb for the second hard drive.

Doug was trying to help someone set up a wide screen display and didn't seem too successful. Anyone have any luck doing that? Please use the lvlug.org mailing list if you have any useful info. Doug successfully also helped Victor with a server-client-flash play problem.

With another group using the room at 2pm, we got pushed out a little early and could have used more time. There was a comment that they thought 11am to 2pm was plenty of time but when we left that we could have used the extra hour we normally have, the rest of the year will be normal meeting hours, 11am to 3pm.

$35 was collected in the Equipment Tip jar, bringing the total to $172.

I'm thinking that a presentation on 'Making Presentations for LVLUG Meetings' on February 23 might be useful. I'll make an outline using OpenOffice and upload it to the lvlug.org site after the meeting for use as a model so others can have an aid for making their own presentations.

Sorry I didn't make it around to everyone to see how they were doing, I was just a little extra busy at today's meeting. Don't be afraid to mingle, that's what the name tags are for. Name, Linux Distribution and CLUE level give you a good starting point. It's a 2 way street folks.

Any suggestions or comments are welcome.

P.S. If you want to know about the first names used in the report check the sign-in sheet in the xcGallery.

Got to the NPC around 10:40 with only Bob from Tuscon waiting to be let in. He helped me set up the tables and chairs. For some reason we set up 4 rows with 3 tables in each row. Little did I know that we'd end up with 5 rows of tables, some with 4 tables in them. Good thing that there are extra tables and chairs in the closets.

24 people signed the attendance sheet, I think there were a few more than that though. I added self stick name tags next to the sign-in sheet for people to put their name, Linux distro and clue (Comprehension of Linux User Experience) level to help others. Most of the folks used them, the name tags sure helped me because I try to talk to most that come to the meeting to see if they are being helped and how they may help others using the same Linux distros.

The room was filled by 11:45 so Frank began his APSFILTER presentation early. Of course it didn't go smoothly. Blinking red light on the printer stopped the show for a while. During the pause I decided to show some youtube Linux videos on screen. Nothing goes smoothly, I brought up 'How to Get Started with Linux' by Chris Pirillo http://youtube.com/watch?v=TdqB5nXJjLU and I didn't have any sound. So after cranking up all of my sound controls I finally un-muted the proper channel and the sound came blasting out. 'Show us your tits' was being shouted and he thought it was 'Show us your tips'. Trying to tone it down and prove I wasn't a complete jerk I kept failing to get the volume down or muted. I think my discomfort was enjoyed by most, especially females. Yes people these are co-ed meetings.

After a while Frank figured out what the problem was and continued on with his demo. This time it wasn't a silent printer anymore, ah the zzzziiiiit sound of a dot matrix. The problem turned out to be a loose nut behind the wheel It helps to have your print driver match the printer your using. Not much detail from me because I was busy taking pictures, see the lvlug.org xcGallery. Others may comment on this News or the mailing list if you'd like to. Today's sign-in is there too. I just can't spend a lot of time deciphering the signatures like I used to.

I had everyone say their name and talk about their experience with Linux. That was very interesting and informative to see where other peoples Linux focus is. I have a 'Kyocera TXCKT10160 Bluetooth Wireless Speaker w/Headset' ordered, $26 with shipping. I bought it mainly for presenters to be heard, but it should also be handy for when others are talking to the group.

Wow! $98 dollars in the equipment tip jar, I think it was Derek that contributed another $2 to make it an even $100. Even Frank threw in $20, which I told him that presenters don't have to contribute, but he insisted anyway. So now the equipment fund is at $195. Thanks again Frank and everyone else that threw some $ in the pot. Hmmmm, maximum attendance when presenters contribute $20. Who wants to present at the January 26 LVLUG meeting for only $20

I need to get another AC extension cord and a few more power strips if we keep getting large turnouts like today. Everyone at the meeting had power and an internet connection, but it looked to me that we were running at over 90% of our capacity. Oh we should be so lucky.

So don't arrive late to the next LVLUG meeting on January 26, 2008 or you might not get the best seats in the house. Of course the best seat is the one the presenter has, hint hint.

Thanks to everyone that helps me to set up and take down all the of cables and equipment.

Happy New Year to all!