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meeting-2010-02-27

Sat, 02/27/2010 - 13:06 — Lesp

Today we had Colin, Mike and Les present at the LUG.

Today's session was split into two distinct sections.

Colin used Chromium OS in a virtual machine (Virtualbox), and Les learnt how to install Slackware from scratch.

Colin used a virtual machine image (*.vmdk) in Virtualbox, to run ChromiumOS, and first impressions were that the distro was firmly based on on the Chrome / Chromium browser. So instead of using a desktop, the user uses different tabs to perform certain tasks.

Link to Chromium OS videos on Youtube

Les felt the pain of Slackware for the first time.
Modern distros really do hold the users hand during the install process.
For Slackware, after booting from the DVD, the user must first partition the hard drive, so that there are at least two partitions. The tool I used for this was cfdisk (a command line tool for partioning hard drives)

  • The partition that will contain the Slackware install
  • A swap partition, that will be used as virtual memory, and for when the PC is hibernated

    • After that was complete, I ran the setup tool, and followed the text based installers instructions, then after 4.8gb was copied to the hard drive, I was ready to play.
    On boot I was presented with a terminal, no GUI! So I logged in and started the GUI using startx (btw I was using KDE4 with Slackware, so that only increased the pain!)
    I managed to get a desktop, but no networking capability, so no internet. My mission for next week, get the internet working on Slackware.

    See you all next week
    Les

    **Breaking News**
    Slackware network config help found...Here my sanity may now return!