Linux-Ottawa (OCLUG) Wiki

When: Thursday, January 7, 2021
Time: 19:00
Where: jitsi video conference (details below)

Welcome to the new year and a newly reworked meeting item, getting started with Linux. We have decided to attempt to formally add some “New to Linux” information at the beginning of the meetings for the first few months of 2021 and see how it goes.

This material may also be of help to those who use linux but can benefit from more information that is hopefully presented in a way that is friendly to non-technical users.

As was mentioned a message or two ago, we want to try a getting started stream as we expect there are a number of people who really don't know how to get started and as a result, can't even formulate what they want to ask since they are not sufficiently familiar with the system to do so. In order to provide a jump start, we are going to take a few people who are “new to Linux” through picking a distro from a very small set (to keep solutions similar), get them to install it, and them get them comfortable with using it. We will document the process and build an intro doc from it as something that can be referenced on the wiki. There can be additional modules later on specific tasks, such as backups, maintenance, upgrades, etc. Input will be welcome.

Well, that is the intent anyway. We will see how it goes and adjust as necessary.

The object is to work on the new program items as the first part and have a second talk to follow on a different, more general, or related topic, possibly in more depth. January will be a little different, as we have a second talk proposed by JF to discuss setting up a distro, which I believe he had suggested Ubuntu. This works well, as we were considering keeping the choices to Ubuntu derivatives.

The meeting URL will now be a fixed URL, https://six.linux-ottawa.org and should be up for connection by 18:30 on meeting nights and will vanish shortly after the meeting has concluded. The codewords that you need will also be predictable so that you no longer need the email with them to join. Hopefully you are on the mailing list so you will know the pattern. If not, it is in the list archive and you just append it to the meeting URL. Since you will be joining as anonymous guests, you will not have a username or password. If it asks for a username and password, it has not been started yet. I will be attempting to have it running no later than 18:45. It should be online earlier, but I expect it to be online by then.

Video and audio will be disabled when you join. In order to make sure the experience is a reasonable one for all involved, the presenter will share their screen-window-whatever they are comfortable with and you will see it quite clearly. Rather than unmute, pressing your space bar is supposed to unmute your microphone while pressed, so you can try that to ask questions. There is also the chat window, which no longer appears to obscure the rest of the session (maybe on small monitors?) Feel free to post questions and as opportunity presents itself and the presenter notices, they will get answered. After the presentation is completed, feel free to unmute and have a normal voice/video Q&A.