BARUG News
January 2004A Happy New Year to all BARUG members and to anyone reading this on the website! December's meeting was held on 17 December, with mince pies and coffee. My copy of Virtual RPC-SE was on display and attracted considerable interest from those who attended. Is this the long-term future of desktop RISC OS? Perhaps 2004 will reveal the answer.... The January meeting will be held at the usual venue on Wednesday 28 January at 1930. The guest speaker will be Paul Middleton, MD of RISCOS Ltd: this will be the talk he wasn't able to give in November due to illness. Paul hopes to demonstrate the version of Select embedded in ROM, and will no doubt offer his insights into the future direction of RISC OS development. In addition, John Stonier will be present and will take a few minutes to brief on the forthcoming SW Show and solicit offers of assistance from BARUG members. The SW Show will again be held at the Webbington Hotel, this year on Saturday 28 February. Details from: http://www.mfraz.freeserve.co.uk/waug/loxton.html The February meeting is due to be held on Wednesday 25 February. However, your Chairman will be absent on duty overseas that week - and will miss the SW Show - and his absence unfortunately also means that the digital projector will not be available. Since it is very difficult for anyone- either home-grown or guest speaker - to give a presentation without the projector, it is suggested that the meeting in February be cancelled and members should get their monthly 'fix' of RISC OS by attending the SW Show instead. I will ask for this proposal to be agreed at the January meeting, so if you disagree, either attend and make your views known or email me instead. Drobe reports that Martin Wuerthner's bid to bring more modern printer drivers to RISC OS is progressing well and initial results are due very shortly. This is a porting of drivers from the Linux world which goes under the title of GIMPPRINT. The GPDriver software is now complete: Martin is reported as commenting "what remains to be finished is the GPSetup application, the setup window for the advanced options, though it is relatively simple. And, last but not least, the installation and usage instructions have to be completed. I hope to be able to start the beta test phase on Monday (19th)." I invested in a new Plextor IDE CD writer this month and promptly found that !CDBurn version 1.58beta6 (which worked fine with an older Plextor writer) would not work with the new one: the device wasn't recognised as being a writer. Upgrading to the latest version 1.59beta7 from the !CDBurn website has fixed the problem. The author, Steffen Huber, commented a few weeks ago on the CDBurn newsgroup that he was working on developing DVD writer capability into the programme. It's good to know the development continues in some areas of RISC OS! http://www.huber-net.de/cdburn.htm I've finally got my wireless network up and running. The problem appears to be that the original router did not want to talk to the original wireless access client at all - despite them both being from the same manufacturer! Changing the client for a different type gave me immediate results. I can now exchange information wirelessly with my wife's PC, and both of us can access the remote printer wirelessly. This week my cable broadband connection should be installed by Telewest which will be the next technical challenge! See you on the 28th. Steve |