March 2002 Meeting
March 2002 started with the kind of rain storm that you
usually only see in a Hollywood film. On Saturday the 2nd the weather
cleared up and the sun came out. So did our local Linux user's who
rose to the challenge of feeling warm and dry in the street outside.
About twenty people came along with their laptops and workstations. Some people even came along without them.
Khurram came along from Sheffield
Computing Services to ask Craig about PHP and what to do with it. Our
Phorum 2.0 bulletin board is now
fully operational. Nice one Craig ! Matt Fairtlough was trying
to figure out some theoretical network stuff. Boris Duerner managed
to get his nose out of a chemistry book for as long as two hours and we all
had a friendly chat with him.
The main subject of the meeting was an installation of IP Cop. After installing it into James Mears machine for the purposes of a demo we found that Richard Davies wanted to use it for real on his own computer at work. James helped to install it into his computer and Richard was seen to be really happy and smiling for quite a few hours. As a special treat David Holden came over from Chester and we let him have a go at IP Cop as well. Seems to be very fashionable at the time of writing.
Much time was spent in talking about general issues. We even saw a Mac user come over from Leeds to talk to us about Mac OS X. He was trying out the PPC version of SuSE 7.3 on his Mac. His opinion was that YaST needed to be changed to work more effectively on Mac. Steve Taylor came to see us later in the day claiming that he meant to come over earlier and get his wireless card sorted out. As he rightly said it's a bit difficult to crack that sort of configuration problem in one hour. Even Bob Holland dropped in from Dinnington for a short time to discuss the community project that they are running over there.
We now find that as we move into March that the 2.4 kernel is still having a few problems with some things such as 56K modems as well as security glitches that ocassionally let people in and even one or two other problems. As time time goes on things are improving and we think that most of the bugs will be removed soon. The next round of releases of the commercial and free versions of Linux is almost upon us and we expect significant improvements in kernel performance and desktop applications.
This particular author went to the Fosdem meeting at Universite Libre Bruxelles....
www.ulb.ac.be ... where amongst other things I saw the beta 2
release of the new KDE 3.0 desktop. I also met Miguel de Icaza and
he gave a very well attended lecture on the Mono project. It was so
well attended that people were standing up in a lecture theatre that holds
about 400 people. Other lectures of note were about quantum computing
and Free GIS which is well worth a look in if you work in Geology or Archaeology
or something of that sort. RMS gave the inaugural speech while I
was there. All about patents and DMCA and how the U.S legal system
was hell bent on destroying the freedom of the individual as well as the
lives of most programmers who are effectively being told that free software
will not exist in future.
My own trip out to the States at the beginning of February revealed that New York was still in a sorry state but probably much happier now that things have been cleaned up a lot. A trip round to the Javits Center and a few days of looking at the stands revealed that Hancom Office was a good application that should be taken seriously. Many other things are in the pipeline which should be taken seriously. The Sharp Zaurus 5000 PDA is presently selling like hot cakes. Here in the UK we can't even buy them due to heavy demand. These PDAs are run purely on GNU/Linux. They have things like the Opera web browser built into them. They are an excellent example of what can be done with free software.
We now look forward to the rest of the year and the much awaited return of summer when we should see the Birmingham Linux Expo take place - he said - hiding under the table.
About twenty people came along with their laptops and workstations. Some people even came along without them.
Khurram came along from Sheffield
Computing Services to ask Craig about PHP and what to do with it. Our
Phorum 2.0 bulletin board is now
fully operational. Nice one Craig ! Matt Fairtlough was trying
to figure out some theoretical network stuff. Boris Duerner managed
to get his nose out of a chemistry book for as long as two hours and we all
had a friendly chat with him.The main subject of the meeting was an installation of IP Cop. After installing it into James Mears machine for the purposes of a demo we found that Richard Davies wanted to use it for real on his own computer at work. James helped to install it into his computer and Richard was seen to be really happy and smiling for quite a few hours. As a special treat David Holden came over from Chester and we let him have a go at IP Cop as well. Seems to be very fashionable at the time of writing.
Much time was spent in talking about general issues. We even saw a Mac user come over from Leeds to talk to us about Mac OS X. He was trying out the PPC version of SuSE 7.3 on his Mac. His opinion was that YaST needed to be changed to work more effectively on Mac. Steve Taylor came to see us later in the day claiming that he meant to come over earlier and get his wireless card sorted out. As he rightly said it's a bit difficult to crack that sort of configuration problem in one hour. Even Bob Holland dropped in from Dinnington for a short time to discuss the community project that they are running over there.
We now find that as we move into March that the 2.4 kernel is still having a few problems with some things such as 56K modems as well as security glitches that ocassionally let people in and even one or two other problems. As time time goes on things are improving and we think that most of the bugs will be removed soon. The next round of releases of the commercial and free versions of Linux is almost upon us and we expect significant improvements in kernel performance and desktop applications.
This particular author went to the Fosdem meeting at Universite Libre Bruxelles....
www.ulb.ac.be ... where amongst other things I saw the beta 2
release of the new KDE 3.0 desktop. I also met Miguel de Icaza and
he gave a very well attended lecture on the Mono project. It was so
well attended that people were standing up in a lecture theatre that holds
about 400 people. Other lectures of note were about quantum computing
and Free GIS which is well worth a look in if you work in Geology or Archaeology
or something of that sort. RMS gave the inaugural speech while I
was there. All about patents and DMCA and how the U.S legal system
was hell bent on destroying the freedom of the individual as well as the
lives of most programmers who are effectively being told that free software
will not exist in future.My own trip out to the States at the beginning of February revealed that New York was still in a sorry state but probably much happier now that things have been cleaned up a lot. A trip round to the Javits Center and a few days of looking at the stands revealed that Hancom Office was a good application that should be taken seriously. Many other things are in the pipeline which should be taken seriously. The Sharp Zaurus 5000 PDA is presently selling like hot cakes. Here in the UK we can't even buy them due to heavy demand. These PDAs are run purely on GNU/Linux. They have things like the Opera web browser built into them. They are an excellent example of what can be done with free software.
We now look forward to the rest of the year and the much awaited return of summer when we should see the Birmingham Linux Expo take place - he said - hiding under the table.