October 2001 Meeting
The October meeting turned out to be one of those
rare ocassions when all kinds of unrehearsed hell that looked like the Sheriffs
pose coming down from the horizon at top speed to the sound of thundering
hooves suddenly became a well informed crowd of people from several different
countries who quite by accident created quite an amazing Linux users group
meeting around us. At least six computers were brought along
to the meeting and most people had their problems sorted out.
We were lucky in that our October meeting attracted about thirty people
for a presentation and a chat about network security. Dr Owen le Blanc
came over from Manchester Computing Centre
and proceeded to give us an excellent list of examples of what not
to do with networks and what kind of configuration options should be used
to increase network security. He was also able to give a brief explanation
of what to do with Iptables which is the firewall utility software that works
with 2.4 kernels. Many questions did follow after his talk. He
even explained that he might not be quite in touch with some things although
he does seem to know most of it.
James Mears finally received a present in the shape of an IBM A21 laptop computer. He asked me to install it as a dual boot machine. This was fine but I'd been through two weeks of the Debian laptop list. Someone on that list was having so much trouble with an A21 that all confidence left me when I looked at James's machine. I offered him Debian 2.2 r3, Red Hat 7.1 and SuSE 7.2. He chose SuSE 7.2 and we set to work to install the software. I needn't have worried about it. After about half an hour of playing around we re-booted and we were asked for which system to boot. After booting we found that the Linux system sound which is Alsa worked first time out. So, if you want a Linux notebook why not try the A21 with the SuSE distro ?
We also had a visit from the fella who is working on the development of Linux on VAX. Isn't that a Net BSD thing I hear you say ? Apparently the VAX version of Linux is becoming popular and so more work on the platfrom is slowly taking shape. A small crowd engulfed him for more than an hour and it was generally observed that Linux on VAX was something that was slightly more than interesting.
One of the strong features of the October meeting was that the general gaggle of people trying to shout at each other over the crowd of people shouting at each other in highly technical language was pretty much a general feature. In fact ..... it was so highly technical that no one at IBM or Sun Microsystems has so far understood too much about it.
Afterwards some of us were invited went round to Matt Fairtloughs place over at t' posh end of town. We were able to shift many bottles of wine and the food was excellent. The ensuing fracah involved an SuSE Linux install which went on until midnight. We are supposing that we will be invited back once again to make up for many man hours spent on programming techniques that require at least three different people with a Phd in computing science each.
If you want to view the announcement for the meeting you can download a postscript or pdf document by pressing return or by clicking on the link below.....
People who were there ..........
Chris Johnson Ed Kingscote Colin Waring Robert Holland Darrel Blake(the one with the dodgy e-mail address) Louise Molden (didn't look mouldy tho' ) Bruce Crowther KWright( anon eh ?) Ian Wright Richard Davies Mike Beadman Owen le Blanc Paul Parkin Matthew Bunting Matt Fairlough Andy Philips James Mears Dave Mimno ............ and some more tho' we can't say who. Where was Ruthie baby ? (sob)
James Mears finally received a present in the shape of an IBM A21 laptop computer. He asked me to install it as a dual boot machine. This was fine but I'd been through two weeks of the Debian laptop list. Someone on that list was having so much trouble with an A21 that all confidence left me when I looked at James's machine. I offered him Debian 2.2 r3, Red Hat 7.1 and SuSE 7.2. He chose SuSE 7.2 and we set to work to install the software. I needn't have worried about it. After about half an hour of playing around we re-booted and we were asked for which system to boot. After booting we found that the Linux system sound which is Alsa worked first time out. So, if you want a Linux notebook why not try the A21 with the SuSE distro ?
We also had a visit from the fella who is working on the development of Linux on VAX. Isn't that a Net BSD thing I hear you say ? Apparently the VAX version of Linux is becoming popular and so more work on the platfrom is slowly taking shape. A small crowd engulfed him for more than an hour and it was generally observed that Linux on VAX was something that was slightly more than interesting.
One of the strong features of the October meeting was that the general gaggle of people trying to shout at each other over the crowd of people shouting at each other in highly technical language was pretty much a general feature. In fact ..... it was so highly technical that no one at IBM or Sun Microsystems has so far understood too much about it.
Afterwards some of us were invited went round to Matt Fairtloughs place over at t' posh end of town. We were able to shift many bottles of wine and the food was excellent. The ensuing fracah involved an SuSE Linux install which went on until midnight. We are supposing that we will be invited back once again to make up for many man hours spent on programming techniques that require at least three different people with a Phd in computing science each.
If you want to view the announcement for the meeting you can download a postscript or pdf document by pressing return or by clicking on the link below.....
People who were there ..........
Chris Johnson Ed Kingscote Colin Waring Robert Holland Darrel Blake(the one with the dodgy e-mail address) Louise Molden (didn't look mouldy tho' ) Bruce Crowther KWright( anon eh ?) Ian Wright Richard Davies Mike Beadman Owen le Blanc Paul Parkin Matthew Bunting Matt Fairlough Andy Philips James Mears Dave Mimno ............ and some more tho' we can't say who. Where was Ruthie baby ? (sob)