Only four people attended our August meeting.  So, what do we do now ?  Well, see the October meeting for what comes next.

Owen le Blanc came over from Manchester Computing Centre and Craig Andrews and myself sat here with Fuad Saeed and talked about the Gnome project and other things to do with the kernel.  We had an extremely lively and well informed chat about most aspects of Linux software.  Fuad was able to talk to Owen for the first time about many things.

The draw for the Wrox Press books about GTK+ and Perl programming was won by Owen.  Bit of a strange coincidence isn't it ?  We can assure you that this was a fair draw. Craig pulled the names out of the hat.  It was a fair do mister.  Owen decided on the spur of the moment that he didn't need the Beginning Perl Programming book and gave it to Craig.  So, there you are.  If you'd attended then you might have stood a chance of winning it yourself ?  Many thank to Wrox Press for providing the learning opportunity for our GNU/Linux Users.

The present round of Window Manager development is nearly as swift as the 2.4 kernel development.   Gnome is already in it's later stages of redevelopment.  KDE2 is nearly finished. I'm using it on my own desktop.  Had to compile my own Qt 2.2 libraries but it's good and I'm sure that it'll become a huge success.  Windowmaker has become more sophisticated and so has XFCE3.  I'm using XFCE on my own laptop and I can get it to play music like Beethoven or Georgie Fame or even old fashioned rock from the 1970's.  FVWM and all of the other WMs are also coming along well.  You can see why it's not necessary to use MS Windows at all ?  Oh yes, I had a chat to Carsten Haitzler n the phone last week.  He's the developer of Enlightenment.  Keep your eyes on http://www.rasterman.com.  We really are going to see some incredible things in the shape of the Enlightenment window manager very soon.

Miguel de Icazza who is the Chairman and CTO of Helixcode is presently working with a team of people to produce new tools for GNU/Linux that will give it the point and click ease of use that it needs more of.  For more info see  http://www.gnome.org and http://www.helixcode.com.  This will quite definitely change the world of Unix forever.  Miguel is known for his many public speeches about the software that he helps to produce.  Well worth a look around the Gnome and Helixcode web sites.  Both Sun Microsystems and the GNU people are very interested in the stuff that Helixcode are producing.  One of the projects is to produce components for Star Office.  Even at the 5.2 release stage it is more sophisticated than anything that Microsoft can produce.  The 6.0 release has been GPL'ed.  This means that it will become a free office suite that is available for use by anyone.

Meanwhile the GNU Project trundles on in the background crushing all argument that comes before it.  The Free Software Foundation was founded many years ago and it's influence in the world of computing is much deeper than many people are willing to admit to.  We are hoping that we will be able to get Richard Stallman to give a lecture at Sheffield University about the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation at some time in October.  More on this later.

Our October meeting promises to be a crowded affair with many people asking questions.  Refreshments will be available for those people who need them.  We do hope that we will see you there :)
 

Richard