Greetings,

How it went in Normandy on 27th February last:

As explained last month the City is facing huge deficits and there is no city staff around anymore on Saturdays. The main door was closed and in order to get in to get in, everybody (in the know) used the back door. Aarg!

Well against all odds we were kept quite busy!

1) Members of other clubs, namely Chess came round in order to use our 4G router and see if the PC were free to use.

2) We had the Greek Ph.D lady back, struggling with her courses on a USB key and trying to read some emails. She also brought some cakes as it was her birthday. Very basic IT followed, tar, zip et al….

3) The guy from the city hall came with an old NEC, Windows was the part giving him trouble, so I went for SLED 11. Installation took time and in the end only thing bothering him was VLC, well me too…

4) More cakes in here, husband and wife with openSUSE 13.1 willing to upgrade and wife with ASUS tablet wanting to play games/email/web browsing etc. There was no power supply and we found out that Leap openSUSE could be installed. We told him to come back next month with a power supply…..

5) The lady of January came and brought cakes as well. Leap and Win7 were working fine! Now she wanted SKYPE, PDF Creator and a few other things that kept our 4G router hot!

6) VLC is a real pain, a guy brought his PC in with Ubuntu and in seconds, VLC was installed, apt-get … We use the Rolls Royce of package installer YAST and no VLC in the end. Always missing a lib here and there. Google and Google….. Not quite!

7) Openstreetmap gave a couple of lectures

8) Sort of family event, two men visitors and both had their sons with them. The kids were very polite and as if they did not exist, so their dads could move around and see what’s up!

9) My nephew came from Nanterre (133 kms), also with his elder son (5 years) he is in the army and discovered openstreetmap. Before he actually joined the army, he came and helped us at NUI booth at Solutions Linux. I had one USB key left and he got it. Let’s hope that the whole regiment does not come round.

10) The teacher came as usual and was not ready to change his openSUSE 13.2 in his classrooms to Leap yet! He had his ears opened and was quite happy that no one was cursing us!

11) Someone wanted to see our RPI2 working, Aarg! It was as if extracting my tooth, and I had to show Berry Boot, sic.

12) Due to new logistics (see last month report), we had less people. Just 27 in total but very intense :)

That’s All Folks, and we had a lot of fun!!!!

Report of 19/03/2016:

I do not have my tongue stored away in my pocket, so I took one of my favorite pens with a white cap and wrote to the Mayor *demanding* better logistics as we have been animating insets and sessions every month since 2005…. We have now a big room on our own, some 90 SQ Meters comprising a back office, storage for our boxes, gear et al, all that on the ground floor where people can see the events, enter, roam, settle etc. here is what happened on Saturday 19/03:

a. It was also the birthday of our Secretary General Laurence and to stay in line with an old French say: “The rain do not stop the pilgrims”, it was business as usual. I smuggled a big cake and tea/coffee/juice of course with the compliments of NUI :)

b. Rejoice was afterwards of course, so we started earlier and in France all LUGs were celebrating “Libre en fête” (Free Festival) on the same date. People were not lured by #LEF and sadly no one told us that they came because of #LEF.

c. Ok, our Greek Lady was in of course, this month we were into Content Management, complete works!!!!!

d. The guy from the City Hall still wanted some java modules and in the end, we went for SLED 11 SP4. Took some time and all was OK and guess what VLC!!!! So help me God.

e. The President of a club in Normandy some 80 KMS away came to see RPI 3, yeah, great, but no image to install as plug and play from openSUSE. Where there is life, there is hope! He will come back next month.

f. Didier one of my good lads was there with his openSUSE 13.2 and happily showing people around

g. Olivier another good lad was there and fighting with NVDI card and also tidying up the back office/storage

h. New comers, one came for Joomla, here we went for MySQL, PHP et al and when I showed Wordpress, his jaw fell!

i. Another new comer had Mint and did not know what to do with…. So I gave him some exercices, ssh, libreoffice etc from KDE / Leap, maybe he will turn his back and endorse openSUSE

j. I noticed a guy moving around, I think that he was not here for openSUSE but what he could lay his hands on. I discretely asked my guys to watch him and snatched back from him a RG45 cable that he was going to put in his bag!

k. This time we installed Leap on the computer of the couple, the wife did not attend (by experience, this is not interesting). Ah, all ok here except the camera on the laptop was not recognized by Leap

l. We had a guy with a brand new laptop and scary to change to openSUSE, Note to self: create a few Live DVDS from susestudio.com

m. Interestingly, many people stopped by, asked questions. Never saw people curious of what was going on.

n. We closed even later as we have our own keys now, “we had a ball”, tired and went for a Brooklyn Brown Ale from NYC and Elvis (look alike) at the Amercian Grill. So we definitely had a lot of fun :D

Plans for 2016:

1. Linux presentation Day #LFD (International Event) 30th April coming soon…. We have plenty of time to prepare this event which by coincidence happens on one of our SFD.

2. 28th May SFD

3. 25th June SFD

4. 10th Sept Associations day in Rouen

5. 17th Sept SFD – International event

6. 15th Oct SFD

7. 19th Nov SFD

8. 17th Dec SFD

I might have a shopping list coming your way for #LFD for starters….

Best wishes,

Jimmy