[Falkirk] Meeting de-briefing

[Jonathan Riddell]

Last Thursday...

 - Kemal brought along his toilet seat style iBook and we installed Yellow
Dog 2.3 on it.  Mostly smooth apart from (you'd never guess this...) X
configuration.  Worked fine for booting off the CD but the final install,
which should have been configured to the iBook, failed for X.  Resorted to
copying the XF86Config file created when booted off CD onto the hard disk,
which involved playing around with mknod.  One day X config will be easy.
 - Gave a brief introduction to Linux to a half Italian couple, obligatory
Knoppix CD was presented
 - Discussed software patents, everyone thought them stupid, nobody had
done anything about it
   Kemal promised to write to his MEPs though, I'll be checking up on you!
   Addresses at http://www.europarl.org.uk/uk_meps/scot.html
   Inspiration at http://jriddell.org/patents.html
                  http://swpat.ffii.org/

   It only takes 10 minutes to write a template saying "EU directive on
patentiability of computer related inventions is a bad idea"  and send it
off to the 7 MEPs.

 - Laura entertained us with tales of late night helldesk answerphone
messages
 - Other chit chat

Next meeting is 17th April, which is also the day my dissertation is due
in.  Only 10404 words to go.

Anyone going to Linux2003 in Edinburgh?

Jonathan