The December meeting turned out to be one of the livelier social occassions of the year.  Deathly silence was to be heard in our meeting room until about 1.30 on the 7th of December and then suddenly a noisy and jolly LUG meeting exploded into action.   Fitted in well with the time of the year and all the things that Christmas is supposed to be about.

About 20+ people arrived and joined in with each other to sort out their problems to do with various computers and networks.  A happy time was had by all.

Simon Robinson was one or the early arrivals.  Works in Barnsley.  He was asking about use of GNU/Linux in business and how it can be supported in the local area.  We told him all that we knew.  Not much but worth a trip to Sheffield to meet the rest of us anyway.  He enjoyed the Christmas meeting as did the rest of us.  Shortly after Simon's arrival the rest of the crowd kind of flowed into the room and the monthly discussion over what's new and what's old began in ernest.  Even Robert Pumphrey came along and helped out in his usual enthusiastic way.  Great to see him around.   Tom Burke who is our local Lotus Notes developer came along and asked questions about firewalls and other things open source.  Nice to know that not all MS Winduhs developers have closed minds and want to learn something about GNU/Linux.   We gave him a few hints about his intended improvement in network security at work and at home.    Tom lives in Sheffield.  He's been to a few of our meetings before.  Like most people he's a busy chap but loves to come along and join in if he has the time.

Meanwhile Marc Duerner and Nick Crouzet arrived and started their much needed Magiconf session.   This project was started on Sourceforge but the developers found that they thought it was a good idea to move the site to somewhere else.  After much discussion a sub-domain was put together at our site and the project was started.   That was back in October 2002.  By the time that Christmas came around the 0.93pre1 version had been released.  What is Magiconf ?  It's basically a back end application written in C and C++ which allows a front end such as a Gnone or KDE GUI to provide point and click configuration of hardware on a laptop or PC.  Even in its early and testing stages it works very well.  If you want to know more about it click on the link above to have a look at the web site.  It's a great application and promises much for the future.  Nick, Marc and myself must have gone at Magiconf for three hours at the meeting.  Lot more to it than most people think.

Alec Melling came along once again with his ever problematical Toshiba.  Not only myself but Craig Andrews and a number of other people have had a go at his problems over the past months.  Alec is as fed up with Toshiba laptops as the rest of us are.  Maybe Christmas 2002 might bring him an unexpected new computer ?  Good luck Alec !   The Sharp Zaurus and anf Compaq iPAQ people were much in evidence as the pictures show on this page.  Putting these machines side by side on the table makes it very difficult to decide which one is better.  The iPAQ with Opie and/or Familiar is excellent.  As is the Zaurus with its standard GNU/Linux GUI that comes with it when you purchase it.  My only criticism was that the Zaurus has a wonderful word processor but hasn't got a full-size keyboard to make it work.  Whereas the iPAQ does have a full-size keyboard but doesn't have an office suite.  So, plenty of room for improvement on both hand held computers.

Matt Fairlough came laong once more.  Seems to be that every other week he has hardware problems.  We know not why.  It's not Matt who is causing it.  Those of us who have worked at the Computacenter are also at a loss as to be able to explain his problems.  In any event we are able to fullfil our usual function of helping home based GNU/Linux users who need some help to sort out those difficult problems when times gets hard.

We did try to organise a key signing party for this meeting.  I have to report that this wasn't a total failure.  A few people did join in with this.  Would have been good if we could have raised more interest but such as it was it was good.

Finally at about 5.45 p.m. we trudged across the road in the winter weather to have our Christmas dinner at the Top Wok Restaurant which is just off the Moor.   We haven't had a Christmas dinner for a year or two.  Everyone thought it was great and said "Can we have more please ?".  

We now look forward to the New Year which will be 2003.  We know that there will be some great meetings and some really different events are planned.   Hope we see you at a meeting soon.

Richard