Tuesday December 14th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

[Bob Proulx]

j dewitt wrote:
> What: Tuesday December 14th, 2021 NCLUG Meeting

Due to working on my car today I arrived late to the meeting.  But my
multi-year project to get my Mazda running so far is successful!
Passed the emissions test easily today.  Now only the DMV is standing
between me and a license plate!

When I arrived Stephen was demonstrating Scribus and using it for the
ability to fill in PDF forms.

    https://www.scribus.net/

Bob suggested that he had heard but not verified that one of ffmpeg
and/or ImageMagick also has the ability to fill in PDF forms.
Unverified.  But I am looking for something that will fill in PDF
forms using free software.

There was a lull in topics at about the half hour.  No one else
jumping in immediately to fill the void Bob ranted for a couple of
minutes on the trials and tribulations of working with systemd on a
server trying to get it to support multiple FastCGI processes.
Eventually I was able to rewrite the unit file and bludgeon it into
submission.  But I was bruised from the experience.

Joe then asked questions about Vanette's Mint system.  It's a Mint 20
system.  But it is having a problem with networking or something and
it is preventing it from working.  The group jumped in to help based
upon the description.  They are going to fire up the system in a bit
and then hopefully we can figure it out.

Vanette is still working on developing a phone running Linux and all
free software.  The discussion mutated into talking about Termux and
that it seems to have stopped getting updates.  And then discussing
using Termux ssh versus Terminus versus Juice SSH versus other things.
Then discussing how to build apps and other for Android.

This segued into Alex talking about his Librem 5 Linux phone.  It
"works" but doesn't do phone things great.  However it is a pretty fun
device that you can apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.  It's running
Purism OS.  Battery life is limited.  Camera functionality only
recently became functional.  But Firefox now works with GPU
acceleration.  And works with the full native Firefox addons.  Unlike
Android Firefox for which only a subset of addons work.  Has a
headphone jack.  Has a replaceable battery.

Matt demonstrated a Microsoft Surface Go with an quite small Atrios
keyboard configured as Colemak running Arch!  This made for a very
small lightweight "laptop" combination that was the size of a full
size tablet.  Running Arch!

We then fired up Vanette's machine and debugged the networking problem
that was preventing other things from working.  A little remedial
network debugging and things were fixed right up.

And with that we adjourned.  Quite a few of us went to Slyce Pizza for
dinner and further continued conversation.  Slyce was actually open
this time which I note only because because last time we tried to go
there it was closed for remodeling.