I think I can say that this meeting will be remembered as one of our better ones. We were able to pull in a decent crowd of people who were all interested. We noticed that there were more MS Windows users than before and we do welcome this. It means that we get more newbies who keep the rest of us in touch with what's really going on around us. The 8th of April turned out to be one of the nicer and sunnier days of the year.
We were able to get Ruediger Berlich from SuSE Ltd to give us a talk about Linux in general and the impact it's had on the international IT market.
I arrived in the morning and Ruediger phoned me as I arrived at Blackwell's to explain that he was not too far away. By the time 12 o'clock came around a few more people had arrived and we were able to help Ruediger to bring his computer and other bits and pieces in through the door.
We were able to assemble and chat to each other right up to 1 o'clock. We began to notice that we had a good crowd on our hands and that we were a bit short on chairs to sit on. Funny how these things happen isn't it ? Ruediger then began his presentation which he did with his computer and an overhead projector that we hired from Sheffield Video Services. He proved himself to be a brilliant public orator and many of us really liked the way he did it. We then had a question and answer session where he asked us the questions and we answered them. Then we had a sort of sit down open discussion about the future of Linux. Superb :-) After this Ruediger then showed us the new SuSE 6.4 distribution and how to install it.
At this point I stood up and made presentations of books to Alex Hudson and Matthew Palmer who is visiting us from Australia. As we all know Alex is good at answering questions on our discussion list and he also writes book reviews for us which are absolutely brilliant. I presented him with a book from Wrox Press which is about programming methods in mobile computers such as the Palm Pilot. Matt has done all sorts of things for us and he deserves a lot more than just a short mention here. I presented him with Using Samba from O'Reilly as a token of our appreciation for all that he has done for us. Paul Sims took some pictures of the presentations and the crowd gave us and Ruediger several rounds of applause as a show of thanks. We were able to see the end of the SuSE 6.4 installation and Ruediger gave us a demo of the Reiser file system. He pushed the off switch whilst his machine was still running and his computer rebooted and loaded Linux in front of us in a few seconds without trouble. That's quite a defrag system eh ?
We were also able to hold a draw for the Office Suite 99 software. This is the office suite that SuSE manufacture and sell. It's based on the Applixware office suite. Craig Andrews won the box of Open Linux eDesktop 2.4 software from the draw that we held on our list. I was able to hand out Red Hat 6.1 Cds (full sets) , Open Linux 2.4 CDs, SuSE 6.3 CDs, Ceebit 2000 SuSE CDs, Star Office 5.1 CDs and various T-shirts and other odds and ends that were much appreciated by the crowd.
A few of us went over to the Hallamshire Hotel afterwards for a few drinks and we did manage to have a lively discussion about all things to do with information technology. At about 6.30 p.m we wandered along the road to Pierre Victoires restaurant and enjoyed a superb dinner at reasonable prices.
Meeting don't get much better than this and we do hope that people will return for other meetings and to ask questions about their own problems.
People who were at the meeting were .......
Paul Sims (ICL) Craig Andrews
Alistair Donlon
Matthew Palmer (from Oz) Bhavesh Mistry
Kieron Long
Bala Amavasai Harvey Kelly
Nigel Wynne
Andy Simmonds (SHU) Alan Goude
Bill McCausland
Bogdan Iftimb Bob
Ham (didn't see the ham sandwich though)
Mike Gramshaw
Chris Morton
Paul Vatish
Simon Brown
Graham Hunter
Rob Barker
Dr Chris Lamb
Nicholas Haes
Nigel Livesey
Andrew Clark
David Wells
Mark Broadbent
Neil Rodgers
Alex Hudson
Sammy Redshaw
Timothy Baldwin Stefano Mori
Owen LeBlanc (ManLUG) Peter Smith
Daniel Fox