The start of a new year and a new milennium was something of a longish celebration for all of us.  There was a huge firework display in the Sheffield are on New Years eve which was more like the kind of thing that you might see in the States.   We do let loose with this kind of pyro technical display at times but the one that we had on the eve of the 31st of December was like nothing that has taken place before or since.    Sheffield Linux User's Group had been through it's formative year in 1999 and now we were looking forward to whatever it was that the new milennia would do for us if anything.   Fortunately for us the local people had made up their mind that they liked us and Blackwell's bookshop at West Street although it wasn't making too much money was willing to let us to continue with our meetings there.   It was a great venue and looking back on it now from the year 2002 it is sadly missed by all of us.  We still talk about it even now.   If you want a look at what took place then please do click on the links below for more info......

January 2000 Meeting. The start of a new century and a new year was something of a dramatic experience for all of us.  We didn't know what to expect with this meeting.  As it turned out things worked out well	Since things went so well in January we thought we might take our chances with the February meeting.  We made up our minds to have a dinner at the Jaflong at Crookes to see if it worked out.  Went down very well.	March was when Matt Palmer came to see us from Wollongong in South East Australia.  Really nice chap.  We had some good sessions with him.  Shame he had to go home.	When Ruediger Berlich was the MD at SuSE Ltd he made regular trips to Sheffield to present new products or the latest version of SuSE Linux.  Everyone looked forward to these and they are now sadly missed by local people.  Our April meeting was quite incredible.	Our May demo days were much quieter than we expected.  Most of us thought that more people would turn up.  The Friday and Saturday sessions were much busier and we did have a good LUG meeting at the end of it.  Roger Whittaker was here from SuSE Ltd and he thought it was reasonably good to go to.	June was a quiet month but the lack of numbers was made up for by the kind of people who turned up.  We had a good time for a few hours and learned somthing whilst we were doing it
July was also quiet but the conversation livened up quite a bit.  It was more like having twenty people round for dinner.  Some informed comment and many questions were asked and answered	August livened up a bit more and people were asking about 2.4 kernels and what was coming next.	September was one of those strange occurences where just four of us sat in the back of Blackwell's bookshop and had a chat about the latest things.  We've had meetings like this one before and so it didn't mean much to us.	October saw Ruediger Berlich return from SuSE Ltd to present SuSE 7.0 to a crowd of about 25 people.  We expected more but some of them had to cancel shortly before Ruediger's talk.  He was well received and got a good round of applause at the end	RMS came along on the 24th of October to give us a talk about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation.	November was our first attempt at getting a well known speaker to come along.  We asked Simon Cousins and he said he'd give us a lecture about Perl.   It was good but we were short on people.
	Our Christmas demo days and December meeting was one of the highlights of the year.  Roger Whittaker came along from SuSE Ltd and noticed that there was more of a crowd this time.  The Saturday LUG meeting was well attended and we even had a Christmas dinner shorlty afterwards.   Great stuff.	We had a bit of a surprise at the end of the year.  Jeremy Alison who was originally from Sheffield and who is one of the Samba developers said that he was at home in Sheffield for Christmas and could he give us a talk.  We agreed and what took place wasn't crowded but it was a success such as it was.

All in all it was a good year.  We had hoped for larger crowds but as we now know the crowds do turn up but not for every meeting.   Just that you can't get in through the door sometimes :)