We had a good meeting with 10 members including one new attendee. Clint led off his presentations with a page from ZD Net Fedora 15 Five Best Features where the writer leads off with comment's on Linux Mint 11, Ubuntu 11.04, and Fedora 15. He first writes from somewhat of an elitist viewpoint "If you’re ...

It appears that a number of Ubuntu distributions are releasing the version of 11.04 without the Unity desktop. Among these are Zorin and Pinguy_0S_11.04. Pinguy_OS_11.04 is a very interesting distribution, it is DVD in size (1.6 GB), and borrows from other distributions including LinuxMint and Fedora.

Tonight's Meeting focus was on showing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty and the Unity desktop and we spent about an hour and half doing so. Linux is undergoing some significant changes in the way we experience the Desktop. With Ubuntu, the future is Unity as we move towards touch screens and a friendlier workspace. It is different from the world of drop down cascading windows like menus and panels taking up valuable real estate at the top and bottom (or sides) of your screen.

We had 10 in attendance including one new attendee. Clint had prepped two computers for the meeting, one with Linux Mint Debian Xfce edition which was just released, and the second with Ubuntu Natty Beta 1 which was released on March 31st, demonstrating the Unity 3D desktop.

11.4 was released on March 10th. There seems to be a number of issues with this release. On my less than one year old netbook, it was reported to have a failing drive when I booted up the Gnome version but not by the KDE Live CD. I don't think the drive is failing as neither openSUSE 11.3 or WindowsXP currently installed is reporting any problems with the drive. The default browser and office suite is Firefox 4.0.x beta and LibreOffice 3.3.1. I recently installed it on a Acer business class system where I had Fedora 14 installed ... wish I had kept 14 installed.

I am on the Ubuntu technical users list and there has been a lot of chatter about a number of issues with Natty. I did get Natty Narwhal working on my test computer and I am getting like what I am seeing but it has not been a painless journey.

Clint started off the meeting with a short presentation on ArtistX, much of the content being found in the article Ubuntu Lucid Lynx 10.04.2 LTS Multimedia ArtistX 1.0 Released our website. He also showed a number of program additions as well as how to start Conky on Login to which there were a couple questions. He then focused in on LibreOffice 3.3 and answered a few questions on it and he had downloaded a video from FOSDEM 2011 on LibreOffice which a showed but as interest wained, the video was cut short. We then moved on to other questions.

ArtistX 1.0 was released on Monday (February 7th). It is a fully updated Ubuntu 10.04.2 using the KDE desktop 4.4.5 (Standard - No Plasma). I have checked it with Conky and with nothing running beside Conky, CPU usage sits at 0 to 1 percent. Nice. I downloaded from the link on Distrowatch (http://distrowatch.com), where I first used the .iso link (which failed after 3.4GB downloaded) and then I used the torrent link which worked great (advantage torrent, you get everything including the checksum).

We had 11 in attendance at the Boise Public Library Gates Lab as the meeting got under way right at 6:30 with the introduction of one guest and the main presenation by member Matthew Kunzman on installing, configuring and using Conky, the Linux Desktop Monitor. Note: All links now are embedded so anywhere you see a hyperlinked words, right click and open in a new window or tab to view. Matthew did a brief intro to Conky including a number of sample screens, where you can download and use the scripts with some editing.

There was an interesting thread on the Ubuntu User Listserve when one user printed out his free command which showed that he had 24 GB of swap space on the hard drive. While no one advocates 24 GB of Swap (unless you have 12 GB of physical RAM) based on the what was written in the thread. The conclusion is that you should have double your physical ram.