August turned out to be one of our more traditional meetings with about ten people attending for a pleasant chat over a PC and laptop both of which were running SuSE 6.4.

We were able to solve a few problems and also find a few more that we didn't know about.

There's a lot to talk about just now.   The 2.4 kernel is coming along much more slowly than we thought it would.  The 2.2 kernel just sort of fell off the end of the computers that Linux Torvalds and Alan Cox use.  There wasn't much fuss and the finished kernels that came to us from Red Hat, SuSE and the other distributions worked very well first time out.  There were bugs but these were mostly sorted out by the people who have to have and use the very latest.  The rest of us just sat back and listened to tales of woe.   Looks like the 2.4 kernel which is at the test 7 stage just now has turned into a sort of a quest for the holy grail.  This isn't too bad a thing when you consider that NT4 and Win2000 kernels are such a pile of rubbish that system admin people spend more than five minutes talking to you about how bad MS products really are.  Part of the 2.4 development thing seems to be a sort of folklore chat over what Linux is or should be.  Those of us who went to the Linux Developers Conference will know that both Alan Cox and Linux Torvalds are hard at work on development and we can only sit here and wait.

KDE2 is at the 1.93 beta stage this week and as I write the rest of the work is in progress.  I'm running KDE 1.93 on the workstation that I'm using to produce this web page.  Most of it does work and stability isn't everything it could be but it has improved a good bit since 1.91.  Features to watch out for are the endlessly configurable terminal window.  Others are, Kmail is now very much like Eudora in MS Windows.  Also the file manager has been renamed Konqueror.  It can be used as a web browser and as such is much better than Opera.   The KDE developers have done us proud this time around and we should thank them for their dedication.

Gnome 1.2 or Gnome 2 as it is sometimes referred to is also very much better.  Helixcode Gnome is available on Cheapbytes CDs and from the Linux Emporium.  I'm running Gnome 1.2 and it is very good.  More stable than the present KDE 1.93.  I've had a few conversations with the Chief Technical Officer at Helixcode and I am assured from his comments that Gnome is safely in the hands of some very competent technical people.   Good examples of projects that will improve Linux are Gernel and Galeon.  Gernel is a GUI application that configures kernel parameters with the ease of point and click.  Makes life a lot easier.  Galeon is the Gnome web browser.  Just now it's unstable and a bit unsophisticated.  But the future as we all know will be much brighter and very much more stable.

Debian 2.2 has been finished and released.  The non-US version is available at Linux Emporium for about £11.50 for a three CD set.  Phil Hands who produced the CDs is still suffering from first night blues.  But with a distro with a reputation like Debian then why should he be worried about the new release ? 

Next meeting is September 2nd.  Hope we see you there ?
 

Richard

28th August 2000