Hi All,

Just a short write up from last night's pub meeting. These are just my notes and are in no way to be interpreted as endorsing or disagreeing with anyone present.

Just 6 persons attended the meeting but nevertheless made a lively group.

There were a number of lengthy discussions covering a wide range of topics. They included such things as (from the more 'mature' members present) old computers, including but not limited to, Amstrad PCW's, Sinclair Z80's and software and hardware upgrades to them.

Other topics included, RAD programming, assembler and C programming and the pro's and con's of the new generation of memory hungry application development systems when compared with the 'old' hand coded methods.

A number of Distro's were covered and dissected. The favourite for clarity and ease of use for a 'newbie' falling on Ubuntu, SuSE was recommended as a good all round Distro but could cause some problems when installing extra packages, while Mandriva 2006 was used by at least 3 of the members present, and with a surprise to me, Mandriva Control Centre was rated as the best use of an application by everyone present (even the hardened command line admins gave it a thumbs up).

We even covered, dare I say this, Windows XP and Vista and the how and whys of mounting a Windows formatted drive. Using the command line in Linux and how it compared with DOS. Making backups on CD or DVD in Linux.

As you will note with even 6 members present it was quite lively and could have been so much better with more. I hope it was an enjoyable evening (it was for me) and I am sure everyone present learned something from the meeting.

Just as an aside is it possible to post things like this on the Dorset LUG WiKi site? I am able to do this on the Quasar Wiki site but the DLUG has a somewhat different layout and a 'How To' would be useful if it is possible. That would save everyone getting swamped with 'Junk Mail' like this.

Regards, Colin.