CiviCRM: managing volunteers and much more

Businesses have lots of Customer Relations Management software to choose from; the voluntary sector has one, tailored for the needs of voluntary organisations from the outset. Unlike most similar software, it is not a free-standing program but runs as an extension to Drupal (for which it was originally designed), Joomla or Wordpress. Moreover, you can select the components of CiviCRM that you need. So you don’t have to burden yourself installing features that you are never likely to need.

August 18 2014: Introduction to Linux, A computer called LEO and snooping

John H summarised his experiences of the Linux Foundation LFSx101: Introduction to Linux course.

David C reminded people not to forget that the function keys on their devices sometimes control whether hardware is or is not available for use.

Brian warned people that the permissions relating to SD cards have changed in KitKat.

IT Stuff website

IT Stuff now has its own dedicated website where you can find full details of recent programmes.

July 21 2014 Slackware at 21 and snooping (again)

David S celebrated Slackware’s 21st birthday with a slide presentation in which he pointed out that, among other things, it:

• has maintained more of BSD’s traditions
• continues to flourish without a major backer
• is simple to install — all dependencies in the core distro have been satisfied
• is compiled for reliability
• has a Core Team, mostly of volunteers
• has support provided by LinuxQuestions.org
• has community repositories hosted on SlackBuilds.org
• has a documentation project.

June 16th 2014 Art, Encryption and Aviation

Without our regular note taker present, the minutes from June’s meeting is a little lacking.  We spoke about Leeds Art Crawl, Flight Radar, Truecrypt, and secure VoIP whilst attempting to install Android on an EePC (and getting slightly further in doing so than WYLUG).

May 19th 2014 CLI discoveries and No place to hide

Brian presented a number of recent discoveries:

• powertop which marks as ‘bad’ processes where power consumption can be reduced
• reptyr which allows you to transfer a running process from one parent to another
• screen which, after you have run it, allows you to do what you want, log out and, when you log in, restore the screen with screen -r
Read more ...

March 17th 2014 Manchester Space Programme, Pi Nest, G-BJVT and the strange tale of systemd

Shi brought in the first edition of Linux Voice.

John H did a brief history of MIME Types in response to a question at an earlier session and then

David B introduced the Manchester Space Programme using the slides which had been used at the 27 February 2014 launch. MADLAB has considerably expanded and Makerspace has moved to new premises.

Web enabled PDFs

When Adobe created the PDF (Portable Document Format) in 1993, it was aimed at large companies who wanted to distribute documents without having to bother about whether those who received them had particular fonts on their computers. While the software to create a PDF was fairly complicated — and expensive, the software to read it was simple. In 2000 this software began to be given away free and in 2008 all the software became an open standard.

February 17th 2014 Desktop, NSA (again), BCB, AWK and Haiku

Brian used recordMyDesktop to demonstrate his Gnome desktop with the Cairo Dock desktop interface, BitTorrent sync syncing all his devices, Gigolo, a GUI for remote servers, to demonstrate how fast the Raspberry Pi is accessing a 2TB drive, and creating and applying a password in KeyPassX.

Life after XP: notes

Hardware

To continue to use an old XP computer, it really needs at least 1Gb of RAM and a 20Gb hard drive. Linux doesn't need 1Gb; it can happily run in less than half that but, for Internet browsing, 1Gb is the recommended minimum if you want to avoid some websites slowing your machine to a crawl.