Club Linux Coffs Harbour

Hi,

I just wanted to introduce myself as I am staying in Coffs for a few weeks over Christmas and will be moving here later in the year when my daughter has finished vocal cord surgery at Sydney Children's Hospital.

I was actually just mucking around with a USB DVB-T twin tuner I bought ages ago, which I had just hooked onto my MSI Wind netbook to try and was happy when I fired up Kaffeine, a KDE video viewer that has good support for PC TV, and wanted a channel list to get it started.

My searching brought to me to your website, which answered another question that I hadn't looked into yet, whether or not there is a Linux Group in Coffs Harbour. I get a bit lost and lonely amongst the majority who live in the Windows world and would like the company of other Linux enthusiasts.

I have been using various distributions since 2004 but did not become Windows free until 2007. I am a single dad with two daughters and we have four computers in the house (soon to be five) and all run GNU/Linux. It was hard to convert my eldest daughter but when Vista would not connect to the wireless network and I could not fix it, despite trying all the methods I could trawl; she readily agreed to try Ubuntu if it played music and Youtube. As she has a nearly new 16" machine with Nvidia graphics and 4Gb of memory I put 64 bit on it with an Nvidia proprietary graphics driver and it goes really well and she is wrapped and has nearly finished the levels in Supertux.

I bought the MSI netbook with the compulsory Windows installed and tried quite a few distros to see what worked out of the box and gave adequate performance. I put Puppy on as I am happy with Abiword and the rest, but had hassles with wireless, bluetooth and webcam. Webcam is optional for me but I have a bluetooth GPS receiver that I want to set up and Wireless is essential if I am to maintain contact with my best friend, the internet.

Mandriva/PCLinuxOS was similar but a bit better, I tried a few others I had laying around and then Loaded a live version of Fedora 11, everything worked but I really dislike the graphical package managers that are available for Fedora and when 12 came out I lost my wireless and couldn't sort out and it really pisses me to have to stick an ethernet cable in to a portable computer to connect. I then tried Jaunty and it was great, everything worked, I put XFCE on to try performance but didn't notice much improvement, except for loading, then put KDE on, which is my WM of choice and it runs fine on the netbook.

I also tried some of the specialist netbook versions and found the interface too restrictive, I guess it would work fine for somebody who just wants to do some internet and word processing.

I put a panel on the LH side to use like a rough dock, with some of the widgets from the bottom panel on it and the applications I use most as well. This works ok because the screen is long and narrow at 1024 X 600.

A while before I left Wollongong for Coffs I did the upgrade to Karmic and it was going really well, everything worked until I did some updates and lost USB totally, I could list the USB devices in a terminal and only see the controllers, the only advice I got on it was to wait for a patch and I needed USB connectivity, just about anything else apart from wireless I could have tolerated but not USB.

Anyway before I left I reloaded Karmic from a disc and got the USB back but (stupidly) I did an update from the terminal and lost it again and had no time to do anything before arriving in Coffs.

I had left my install discs at home in the effort to get out the door and was praying that I would find a computer mag with Ubuntu on it and managed to find a last-month Linux Magazine with Jaunty on it, which I am using now to post this. It keeps bugging me to upgrade to Karmic but I refuse.

I have a question if anybody has got this far and is still awake:  I bought a Virgin wireless broadband modem and plan and put my parent's Coffs Harbour address in the box to check it, got the big thumbs up from Virgin and went ahead. It is slower than dial up and pissing me off to the point that I am going to give it back to them, as there is no point in having it if it won't work in Coffs. Can anyone here shed some light on this? Also I haven't been able to set it up in Ubuntu as I can't find configuration settings, if anybody has advice on that one?

Anyway enough rambling, I like what I have seen of your group so far and am looking forward to meeting with you.

Kind regards,

Roger Barnes

Randy.Ashell@gmail.com