We had a very well attended meeting tonight, a good discussion of Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, Hardy Heron, as this release looks to be a real keeper, with a few minor issues. Clint had installed it on his old PIII 1 GHz laptop with 256 MB of Ram with good success and added on multimedia support as well as Acrobat 8 and other applications such as Gramps and Alexandria Book Collection Manager, all with good success. One minor, could be cadd onsidered major on older hardware, 8.04 now defines all drives as scsi including IDE and this seems to have problems with some IDE drives and IDE controllers, with the result of the Live CD booting to BusyBox shell with a user prompt of (initramfs) no matter what boot option selected. The fix seems to be to add all_generic_ide to the boot line in startup menu (F6). One f our focuses of the evening was wireless connectivity. The Network Manager in 8.04 is very good in managing wireless connectivity and appears to handle the various wireless security modes (wep, wpa, wpa2) well. A couple of tips in using include, if you are accessing an unsecured network, select WEP and leave the password blank works. Secondly, to avoid restarting, it is useful to open a terminal session and use sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart to fire off the DHCP process and get the working ifconfiguaration for the connection. You can also use sudo route -n to verify that you have the correct gateway as a double check if you are having problems getting to the network. Gregg B. had brought in his older Micron Pro with 8.04 installed and we used that to go through the wireless configuration to make sure it was working for him. It was also noted that very little need for ndis wrappers in 8.04 as many wireless adapters that were previously unsupported natively now work just using the Network Manager to configure.
Mike B. brought in his system which he had added a 3rd Sata drive to and couldn't get the grub boot menu to work. A new member at tonights meeting, also named Mike, really worked some grub magic in resolving the boot configuration issues including reassigning drive ID's in the grub menu and installing grub on the boot drive; new member Mike is truly a master of grub among other things Linux.
Finally, if you want some nice wallpaper for Ubuntu 8.04, head on over to http://www.gnome-look.org/index.php?xcontentmode=172 and download whatever catches your eye!
We still need suggestions for our next meeting on June 5th. Please email c_tinsley@msn.com if you have something you would like to present or see presented.