After some days of sweating over some new machines in a computer workshop at London Road I was able to get them over to Blackwell's bookshop on the 3rd of May and install a network into the room that we use for our meetings at Blackwell's.  After some more work I was able to get the Red Hat machine to work as a gateway.

On Thursday morning the doors opened and we were able to meet the public once again and explain what Linux is and what can be done with it.  About 40 people turned up during the day and Matt and myself were able to watch the SuSE Cebit 2000 demo CDs vapourise through the door as if they had wings.  The Cheapbytes Red Hat CDs that John Winters had sent over from Linux Emporium went with them.  After much discussion between Matt and myself we decided to go for a Debian gateway and Matt set to work installing a Debian machine and a good job he did too.

Friday turned out to be a quiet day but we made up for it on Saturday which was also our monthly meeting.  About ten of us turned up for the meeting and Roger Whittaker arrived from SuSE Ltd at Borehamwood.  We also had several members of the public who turned up to find out how to install Linux.  An hour into the day and we had a completely re-configured the network with a Red Hat 6.2, SuSE 6.4 and an Open Linux eDesktop 2.4 machine.  The Debian secure box was the gateway.  We also had one or two others kicking around.

It was a good session and the meeting went down very well with everyone.  We were able to resolve many issues which will be of use to us in future.  I think Roger was very interested in the way we did things and learnt one or two things himself.

At the end of Saturday we went along the street to the Bankers Draught where we consumed food and several pints of beer.  LUG meetings don't get much better than this :-)