BENTSEN GROVE RESORT COMPUTER CLUB BULLETIN
Week of February 12, 2007

MEETINGS
MONDAY
ROOM 3 & 3R
BEGINNERS
PRESENTATION
9:30 AM

GENERAL
MEETING
10:30 AM

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS:
If you would like to meet in a small group to discuss one of the following subjects, contact the following people.

PHOTOGRAPHY
INVESTMENT CLUB		 Bill Wiese
Corinne Higbee		 580-3184
585-5664

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 EMERGENCY
RESPONSE
TEAM
John Abbott……424-7113
Harold Buechly...581-3180
Corinne Higbee...585-5664

UPCOMING EVENTS:    Please wear your badge!
Friday February 9, 2007, 4:00 PM Photography SIG By Claude Westfall
Monday February 12, 2007,   9:30 AM New User LESSON By Corinne Higbee
Monday February 12, 2007, 10:30 Door prize drawings for members
Monday February 12, 2007, 10:35 AM General meeting By John Abbott
Monday February 12, 2007, Noon - 2 PM, Pizza SIG, By Corinne Higbee at Mr. Gattis

Claude Digital Photography Class by Claude Westfall
All classes on digital photography will take place on Fridays at 4:00 PM in the West Hall computer room. Since I-View software will be used all participants should download both the software and the Plugins/AddOns as soon as possible. The software site can be found listed in the BGRCC (www.bgrcc.com) under Top Down Loads. Copies will be available for anyone having problems downloading the software to their computers. All participants are urged to take some pictures and bring them to class to demonstrate several I-View features for editing and manipulating the pictures.

CorinneCorinne Higbee, New User Lesson 
We will continue on the computer maintenance and http://www.bcot1.com Lesson 8 and 9.<URL: http://www.bcot1.com/newbietips.html > There are seven pages here in Landscape Print. You may want to read over the lesson 9 and locate the keys on your keyboard. Not all keyboards are alike, so Print Screen may be marked or it may be a picture on the lower right, between the alt and ctrl keys. Many people do not use some of the materials that are talked about in the lesson. If we can demonstrate a newsgroup and how to use the information you may enjoy seeing how much information is really available for you.

We will have our drawings for tickets to Mr Gattis and prizes after the second session. This session will include how to set up your email at various sites. if you want a gmail we can get you an invitation. Just let us know. See you Monday. 
 
JohnJohn Abbott, General Meeting
John has an exciting program lined up for you this week. His demonstration will include several easy to use, new and upcoming features available to us, again at no charge to use. His presentation will be fun and make you aware of several web features you will soon be using.

This is a picture of John 1. See picture of John 2 below.

HaroldHarold Buechly, Last weeks General Meeting.
I enjoyed demonstrating some of the features of OpenOffice last week. The cost of some other group of office programs is prohibitive for retirees using it ocassionally but may be justified for businesses and professional organizations. With the free download, free to use and frequent updates, it may be just the thing for you. During the 1 hour I spent demonstrating it may have seemed complicated. It is ready to go just as it is installed. Use it a few weeks and you will discover what all you can do with it. Just use your imanigation, look it over, check the help built in and look at the various demonstrations on their web site. http://www.openoffice.org/

SPECIAL INTEREST GROUP “SIG”    By Corinne Higbee
Our most popular SIG is the PIZZA SIG. We will meet at Mr. Gatti’s at noon. Yes, that’s this coming Monday.
Door prizes will be drawn at class Monday, (MEMBERS ONLY) computer related items. Drawing will take place at 10:30. Must be present to win.

FOOD****FUN****GAMES****EDUCATION

Immediately following our regular meeting on Monday, the Computer Club members, spouses and guests are welcome to caravan to Mr. Gatti’s Pizza, 4100 N. Colonel Rowe Blvd. (AKA 2nd Street), McAllen TX for FOOD, FUN and GAMES. Mr. Gatti’s is located on the northeast corner of Colonel Rowe and Nolana.
For an entrance fee of $5.29 (Seniors), you receive all you care to eat of salad, pasta, pizza and drink.

EVERYONE WELCOME

John AbbottKeeping The Settings from Ubuntu Live CD
Some or all of the 30 folks who received a copy of Ubuntu Live CD may by now wish there was a way to keep the settings when you reboot out of Ubuntu. Well there is good news for you then. There is a little known fact that when Ubuntu boots up it looks for a volume titled casper-rw to recover initialization and settings.

You will need a small USB thumb drive (256 MB should be fine) and if you don't have one they are about $9 each at Wal-Mart or CompUSA and most of the stationary supply houses like Office Max.

Once you have the drive you are ready to create a “persistent” home directory. In computing, the home directory contains the personal files of a user. The kernel looks for that when it starts your operating system.

  • Put the Ubuntu CD in the CD drive and reboot the computer. Once Ubuntu has loaded you need to open the terminal emulator which can by found by selecting Applications -> Accessories -> Terminal     The terminal will open and present you with a line like john@ubuntu-thx1138:~$
- important note - Linux is case sensitive. Ubuntu.txt and ubuntu.txt are different files.

  • Now type in df -h to get a report of disk space usage. You should get a listing as follows:
john@ubuntu-thx1138:~$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 181G 17G 155G 10% /
varrun 440M 88K 439M 1% /var/run
varlock 440M 4.0K 440M 1% /var/lock
udev 440M 144K 439M 1% /dev
devshm 440M 0 440M 0% /dev/shm
lrm 440M 22M 419M 5% /lib/modules/2.6.15-27-amd64-generic
/volatile
/dev/sdf1 968M 665M 303M 69% /media/UBUNTU

Now you may remember that I said at the presentation that you couldn't change anything on the computer or its peripherals unless you were in the Super User mode where you have all privileges and can make major and permanent changes.sudo puts you in the super user doing this mode. When Ubuntu asks for a password enter your log on password.

  • At the $ prompt type in sudo mkfs.ext3 -b 4096 -L casper-rw /dev/sdf
  • You will be asked if you want to wipe the drive and your answer is y
  • type in exit

You should be looking at your desktop and the thumb drive icon should be visible. Right click on the thumb drive icon and selecteject. Linux will complain that it can't eject it because its not a CD but you'll notice that the icon is missing (and the power is off on that access) You may now remove the drive.
Congratulations! You've done it!

  • Reboot the computer again. When you get the boot menu from Linux, press F4 for boot options. Don't change anything yet but put the “casper-rw” thumb drive in the USB port. Now at the prompt: type in Live persistent and press enter. From here on all the settings, any downloaded programs will be saved to the thumb drive.

I know this might seem a little daunting to some of you. So I will be happy to have you come over and go through it on my computer with me coaching. Call me at 424-7113 to make sure that I'm available and come on over.

You shouldn't have to use the command line mode again – unless you want to. That's it for this bulletin. Next bulletin I'll show you the easy way to find and download and install programs. There are 24,400 of them in the Ubuntu repository and another 34,000 that are in other repositories – so something should look good to you.
Have fun with Linux!


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