Well, it was something of a surprise ?  A new millennium, a new century and a new year all at the same time.

Our January 15th meeting took place at Blackwell's bookshop at West Street here in Sheffield.  Our usual spot is the community centre at Walkley but we thought we'd try the back room at Blackwell's just to see if it pulled in more people.  It proved to be "the place to meet".

We started at 10.30 a.m.  More than fifteen people turned up.  Even Foz turned up from Manchester Metropolitan University.  I brought along my demo PC courtesy of Fuad Saeed who gave me a lift into Blackwell's in his car.  He had to go to a wedding later on which was a bit of a shame.   Paul Sims showed up with a laptop which had SuSE 6.3.  Looked very nice :-).   I installed Best Linux into my PC and showed it around.  This is basically a Red Hat clone.  It interested everyone who was there.  In between the pleasant chat that followed I installed Corel Linux which also proved to be something of a miniature revolution in itself ?  Really nice software.  Went down well with the coffee and sandwiches.  Alastair Donlon from Sheffield University helped me with Corel Linux.  I couldn't get the mouse to work.   Everyone liked both systems and much comment was made about Corel Linux and how much impact it was making out there in suburbia and the world of business.  Matthew Collins was there and he handed out CDs of Definite Linux 7.0. Definite Linux is a Red Hat clone which has a few things included which were left out of the official Red Hat distribution.  It's produced courtesy of Jason Clifford.  The official Red Hat contingent arrived part way through the afternoon when Jez Tucker and his friend turned in from Coolbeans.  They do media projects of all sorts with Red Hat as their choice.  Unfortunately they operate under a closed set policy and so we are not allowed to see Red Hat software working on their premises.

This was definitely one of our better meetings and we look forward to more of them.   We were all able to get some good feedback about our own problems and where Linux is going to.  The format of "an informal chat in a room and play about with a computer" seems to be the way to get things across.