When I got home last night Michael had a laptop on his desk. He’s always bringing laptops home from work to work on, so I didn’t think much of it, but asked about it all the same.
“It’s yours.”
“Mine?!”
“The last of your Christmas presents!”
YAY!!! %D!!
He’d mentioned an old Dell laptop they had at work about a month ago, said he was going to ask his boss to sell it to him so I could have a laptop. But I hadn’t heard anything since. Apparently he was finally able to convince his boss to sell it.
It’s a Dell Inspiron 7500, 600mhz, 128 megs of ram, I’ll have to look up the rest of the specs when I get home, I just haven’t had time. I have been looking at used laptops for a long time, I would have been perfectly happy with my 333mhz Compaq forever if it hadn’t died. All I wanted was something portable that worked in Linux, this machine is faster than any of the ones I was looking at getting.
I started the Ubuntu install around 6PM, got through the CD part, rebooted and let it install the rest of the way while we were at the MontcoLUG meeting. When we came home around 11PM I was welcomed to the Ubuntu GUI login screen! I logged on and at first glance things seemed to be alright, unfortunately I needed to get to bed and couldn’t tinker and test things. Some searches online lead me to believe there shouldn’t be any problems with the basics, Ubuntu Breezy at least supports everything out of the box (Hoary is on it now). The wireless card is really the only thing that might give me trouble, and there is always ndiswrapper if nothing else works.
It’s such torture to be at work when my new laptop is begging for attention!
Finally, the MontcoLUG meeting.[lj-cut]
We had 7 people, met at a house in Telford, which turned out to be on my way home from work, I pass by it every day. I’d say it went very well. Spent a little while just talking, joined our host’s family in their dining room for a pizza dinner (and some delicious homemade chicken soup).
Clockwise from top left: Lyz Krumbach, Michael Joseph, Marty Squicciarini, Tom Lowery, Lee Marzke, Jesus Arocho, Michael Bevilacqua
After dinner I did a presentation on “Text-based communication in Linux” (links related to the talk here). Then we spent the rest of the evening just chatting about Linux, “wiring the house” and the techological advances in sewing machines (which was quite an interesting and surprisingly long discussion). As with the last meeting, the conversation had a life of it’s own, and I would like to think we all came away from the meeting with something. I also got to unload most of my Ubuntu CDs, and a bunch of books received from publishers.
As the evening wound down, Jesus brought out a bottle of red wine to share. Apparently he and his wife make their own wine! Excellent! Since starting the homebrewing of beer we’ve thought about venturing into wine-making, but until last night I wasn’t convinced it’d be worth it. Jesus and his wife sure can make red wine, not too bitter, not too sweet, nice alcohol content. It was good.
People started yawning shortly before 11 and we wrapped things up. Good stuff.[/lj-cut]