Tonight I started by picking up new member phil for 19.50 to get to the brit for 20.00. When we arrived but no other members were present I said to phil andy is usually here before me so carried on to the bar and got the usual pint of cider and phil a J20.. Not much longer had we sat down andy arrived with another new member dave! which was a surprise as I never knew we had another member showing! We talked about what dave and phil used and phil talked about working for IBM and showed us his brail laptop which was quiet interesting. Phil talked about programming and embedded linux which was quiet interesting and we talked about programming on the multi platform game second life – which the client can be downloaded for free and installed on linux – mac and doze.
The conversation strayed of to items not usually covered by the group but hey were all up for different things and were all pretty open minded people! Next month is the lancaster lug xmas bash which will be held on the second wednesday of the month and ill be putting on some free grub for the lads!! so again we can just go with the flow! next year we can look at getting it back online again with some demos etc!!!!
But the group is still going strong and thanks to all that turned up 
Im just looking forward to the xmas bash now hoo hoo hooo!!
We had a few more people showing interest this month infact three new members interested – anyway it started with gareth getting to my house for 8pm -> then we went for james at the morecambe hotel and then flew through to the brittania pub – i must say gareth enjoyed the ride!!! When we arrived andy was already at the meeting armed with mini laptop and our new member duncan who was younger than I expected but none the less from the conversations a loyal linux user 
we looked at the sound problem on james HP laptop were he has all the sound working apart from the internal microphone which e tried to fix but had no joy – id say this could be fixed if we had a proper poke around james tried removing pulse audio which im not sure was a good idea!! we talked about installing gentoo and also talked about installing arch linux which im eager to have a play with this week in a virtual machine! Mark turned up for the last hour and we took a look at a site andy has been working on that looked very good.
James girlfriend turned up to give him a lift and me and gareth shot back to mine and stayed up most of the night installing and testing games and other apps on the macbooks!!!! bring on next month more linux chat and CIDER
We held this months lancaster linux user group meeting on the 2nd wednesday of the month this time to fit in with everyones busy schedules! We havent had a meeting for a few months because we have all been to busy hence the change to the second week! Quite a good turn out so thanks to everyome who turned up! Dave brought his open moko and give us a demo of the new OS he had installed which was pretty slick – he connected it to his laptop and updated the phone using wireless from his laptop which worked nicely then he can install the network app and install the updates and proggies straight from the phone nice bit of kit
We talked about installing multiple operating systems on x86 hardware – making it triple boot with linux / mac / windows
We also discussed various laptops – netbooks and using external devices on the units such as external monitors and keyboards etc.
We also talked about video software and capturing video and audio – i mentioned zoneminder which is a opensource Linux video camera security and surveillance solution. Very mature product – with online viewing of cctv
I took a look at a toshiba laptop and used the hotkeys – shift and escape to change the boot order in the bios and kicked of a fedora install – i had to leave before the install finished so ill update the blog to let you know if the install finished ok and the laptop works right!!
we also had a long conversation regarding building web pages and uploading them using a ftp client – we talked about using kompozer aka NVU – cross platform software which can get you bulding web pages in minutes take a look here after the site is finished if you can use various ftp clients I use gftp as its nice and easy and very robust take a look here both items should be installable by apt so i would type apt-get install kompozer gftp – this should install both apps for you
The linux meetings are held at the brittania pub on ulswater road lancaster on the first wednesday of every month at around 8pm – I would suggest adding yourself to the lug mailing list as some months we may change it to the second wednesday of the month if everyone cant make the first!!!!
Please feel free to come along and talk – newbies welcome!! we cover all areas – linux / mac / windows – servers – laptops – workstations – mobile phones!!! come along and join in – good beer & free wifi!!!!!
Very interesting meeting talked about window various window managers and had a great demo of andy a 3D virtual tour he built using java script. Then we set of down to the bobbin to catch a band but they all finished! (at 10 oclock!!??) anyway we moved onto the penny bank and caught the blues band in there which were pretty darn poor and then finished up the night in hustle!! Great meeting
The lancaster linux user group is going strong – we have a meeting the first wednesday of every month in the brtittania in lancaster – if your interested in linux – mac osx – html – developing etc then feel free to come along!!
It doesnt matter if your new to linux or just wanting to find out more information. Please feel free to join the mailing list or drop me a email if your interested
blog @ wayneward .co.uk
(without the spaces!!)
Come join the lancaster LUG
The lancaster LUG is going great i just would like to say if anyone is using linux or a apple mac in the area and would like to come along to the meetings please feel free to drop me a email for details or visit our LUG website @
Hello and sorry for the late meeting minutes!!
We had a short meeting this month as i was also at another meeting on the same night!!! The morecambe mini club at the strawberry gardens..
Anyway I got there nice and early but some had stole our seats in the green room!! Anyway ken turned up and we had a chat at the bar about vista on his new computer microsofts biggest failure!! then dave turned up and then andy for a while as he had another meeting aswell!!
We had a look at kens new laptop and looked at suse linux 11 – very impressive runnning yast in the console and kstars and a graphic stacking program.
The laptop ran great very responsive I even tried suse out myself after seeing that you can add a realtime kernel patch for audio editing and you get kde 4 built on the new suse 11 live image.. i blogged it at www.wayneward.co.uk
We also talked about various discussions we could have
Me: Install and setup kolab server – configure domain and users – add shared calendar / contacts / notes / events – add kontact client to kolab server.
Ken – Graphic editing using – gimp / krita – Basic editing and layers.
Andy – Music editing part II- Midi editing
Please let us know if you have anything you would like to talk about
or if you have any comments about the ideas we have if your intrested in these etc.
Regards
Wayne
This was one of our extra meetings we added on the third week of the month as we had a home demonstration on linux audio on editing on 64studio by andy at his place.
Present : ken – dave – wayne – andy – mark & richard
Andy showed us audacity – qjackctl – ardour & rezound
I missed the first half hour or so but seems we had a demo on the jackd server and how qjackctl controls it.
Also they discussed the firewire hardware connected to the latop which we can connect various external connections including a balanced microphone connection (XLR) with phantom power and a jack socket connection for guitar also has a spdif connection for digital audio. Then we just connect this into various programs using qjackctl.
We did some simple editing with audacity and rezound. Then we opened the amazing adour and put some guitar and multitrack drum down. Then we sent the these two tracks to another bus and added effects to the two tracks a bit of reverb and some flanger and panned the tracks a bit to add the stereo feel !!
The demo was very good and andy explained this very well !! We also may be looking at extending the demonstration in a month or so and adding the midi functionality to what we was doing tonight !!!
The plugins we were using were ladspa plugins and are available through apt. read more for info…
Ladspa plugins available
mcp-plugins – LADSPA plugins designed for Alsa Modular Synth
caps – C* Audio Plugin Suite
swh-plugins – Steve Harris’s LADSPA plugins
tap-plugins – Tom’s Audio Processing LADSPA plugins
blop – Bandlimited wavetable-based oscillator plugins for LADSPA hosts
cmt – Computer Music Toolkit (cmt) a collection of LADSPA plugins
fil-plugins – parametric equalizer LADSPA plugin
omins – a collection of LADSPA plugins aimed at modular synthesizers
vcf – audio EQ biquad filters for LADSPA
apt-get install mcp-plugins caps swh-plugins tap-plugins blop cmt fil-plugins omins vcf
64studio is a linux – debian based distro setup for video / audio editing out of the box more information here
Lancaster Linux Meeting
September 3rd 2008
People present
ken – dave – wayne – andy – chris – matt a.k.a trout – mark
Various talks on laptops and virtualization using virtualbox. We had a quick talk on 64studio and jackd and the power it has for connecting devices and programs together.
Matt & trout talked about devel and kernel processes and running linux X programs in vista using a module im not sure what he used to do this if anyone has information this could be quite handy for someone… we also had some entertaining chat on older versions of linux including quite a bad bad bit of patching in redhat 6.3!!
We had a look at various laptops that run windows and linux out of the box andy has one from linux emporium which come pre-loaded with ubuntu. WE looked at dell’s latop offerings and HP. running suse and activation and talked about finger print security
Matt talked about doing a talk on coding and were to start. Which raised a lot of intrest.
We also may be taking a visit to access space sheffield were they have open source discusions and projects. www.access-space.org
If anyone is intrested in a visit this please let us know.
We may be holding some of our talks at the basement single step penny st. They have a projector and is ideal for giving demonstrations.
It looks like the lug websites maybe coming back into action this week and me and dave will both be getting access to the webspace etc. We will be making changes to the content and would like any feedback on items you might want to see in the new lancaster lug website.
We still need to confirm who will attend the 64studio demo at andys house on the 17th of september.
Thanks for coming we are now up to 7 turning up to the meeting which is pretty good for the second meeting!!!!
Well what a great turn out for the lancaster lug!
I got to the brit at 7.30 and thought oh no!! Please turn up! anyway i just ordered a pint and in walks ken with his hands full laptop and the demonstration kit! yes the first night we get a demonstration and a very intersting demonstration! We talked for a while about distros and other linux related topics and it wasn’t long before we before we was joined by dave paul and mark! We had our introductions and it seemed obvious we had a mixed bunch of linux users here which is great! dave sporting the lancaster lug tshirt!!
We were deep in conversation about linux of course! when a guy randomly asked is this a linux user group!?! We said yes!! he said great and introduced hiself and said he would like to attend the next meeting on the first wednesday of next month cooool!
Any way we discused different distros – ubuntu – debian -novell – redhat – mandiva and get this unix and open vms!!
We talked desktops kde gnome and i gave a brief on kolab server which is something i will be demonstrating over the net few weeks..
Then ken give us a quick demonstration on kstars and a modified webcam for Astrophotography and a pic programmer which operates two motors Very good demonstration which i didnt expect on the first night!
we also discussed laptops I showed of my asus Eee pc running debian which was a eye opener! and we looked at the other laptops which were both IBMs running ubuntu.
Anyway this was a great meeting and we will be at the brit next month on the first wednesday.
Im very happy with the turn out the conversation and we all bonded great!!
Ive also added another blog to my blogs for ken to install networkwork manager for kde to help his connection to wireless networks without hassle
Wayne
ps kens site for information on astrophotography and some other items is
http://www.slscope.co.uk/
My blog is
http://wayneward.co.uk/blog/