[SGVHAK] Thursday meeting recap: 8/1

[Lan Dang]

 Hi all,

We met at Dave's workshop this week.  Here's what you missed:

There were several things going on during this meeting.

We saw Dave's tank, which he'd been 3D-printing parts for, mostly put together.  It is huge, and moves quite nicely on its treads.  His 3D printer was there as well, but we were too distracted by other things to take advantage of it.  Maybe next time.

John W. (Tux-Lab) worked on assembling his delta-design 3D printer.  The parts were cut out of clear acrylic, and I have to say it looked very pretty.   I can't wait to see it complete and in action.  

Mic found some new folks to teach lockpicking to.   John C. and John K. were there; they are relatively new to the HAK.

I think Mic and James were trying to install Linux on the MK802 mini PC, the computer that looks like a thumb drive.  The problem is that even though the device goes by a particular model number, it doesn't mean that the it's using the same chipset inside.

The main event, of course, was putting together Dave's new computer.

How many folks does it take to put together a computer from scratch?

Well, we had a peak of 9 people at Dave's workshop this week.  It was John C., John K., Michael, Mic, and I helping Dave assemble the computer.   Michael took charge of the Linux install, but he had to leave early..  Steven took over the Linux installation with John C. grabbing the ISOs and making USB-bootable images via the Yumi Multi-boot USB creator.


Dave got a really nice mid-tower case, an ATX MSI motherboard, and an i5 processor.  There was also a power supply.  I think it took us less than an hour to assemble the computer.  We let Dave handle the delicate (and potentially expensive) insertion of the processor into the motherboard.  Everything fit together really nicely.  The board was well labelled and the case even came with cable ties.

We hooked it up to a wireless keyboard/mouse combo and a TV through HDMI.  The BIOS was impressive.  Is it still the BIOS these days, or something else that handles the pre-OS stage?  Regardless, it had a lot of fancy options, and there was mouse support!  

And then it was time to install the OS, and that's when things went downhill.  We tried to run a CentOS Live DVD and got a kernel panic.  I think there was a keyboard issue with Ubuntu Desktop.

We had to swap out the keyboard and mouse for a USB model.  I think Ubuntu Desktop worked fine after that, but Dave wanted to try a Red Hat flavor.  We tried removing and changing out various peripherals to get past the kernel panic, but I think we gave up and went with Fedora instead.  The only problem was that Fedora didn't like the Linksys wifi dongle,  so we had to borrow a Linux-compatible one (EDIMAX) from James to get Internet access.  I had a wifi dongle (TPLINK) that was reputed to be Linux compatible, but the rev2 model inexplicably is not and requires the manual installation of a driver.

Sorry about the vagueness regarding the Linux install.  That's when I decided to go off and do other things.  Don't tell the LUG I said this, but this is exactly the reason I use a Mac at home.  I do not like  
worrying about Linux hardware compatibility issues.

I don't think the computer was done by the time we headed out to a late dinner, but it was in a good enough state for Dave to work with.  We had dinner at Carmine's, which was pretty quiet on a Thursday night.  Good food and good conversation.

Lan
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