[Glastonbury] Inaugural meeting

[Martin WHEELER]

A big thankyou to Steve Leonard-Clarke for organising last night's
inaugural meeting of the Glastonbury Linux User Group -- a great time,
and a great venue.  (Many thanks to the St. Dunstan's School also for
providing us with such a well-equipped and comfortable meeting space.
That's a real bonus, *much* appreciated.  Let the school know, would
you, Steve?)

There were more people there (10) than I had ever imagined would be
interested in Linux in Glastonbury.  From memory:

Chris ?  and Sian ? and ?? (wearing a baseball cap)

and those whose names I *do* remember:

James BOBBETT
Antony BRAND
Tim HALL
Steve LEONARD-CLARKE
Kelvin McNULTY
Sean MILLER
Martin WHEELER

to whom should be added the following members present in spirit if not
in person, who sent in apologies for their absence (one in Cheltenham;
one in Torquay; the rest up to their eyeballs in exams):

Andy CATER      <amacater at galactic.demon.co.uk>
Hereward COOPER <coops at thepixiepeople.co.uk>
Nick IRWIN      <nirwins_bong at lineone.net>
Nick PALMER     <crashnburn1981 at glastonbury1.fsnet.co.uk>
James VALLIS    <james.vallis at easynetuk.co.uk>

and of course, Tim's colleagues, whose names I don't know.
And maybe several others, for all I know.
All in all, a phenomenal turnout.

We were all having so much fun we forgot to do any of the boring formal
things, like try and organise ourselves; decide on regular meeting
times; possible future programmes; constitution; etc.  Personally, I'm
all in favour of informality -- it's well known that I work best under
conditions of utter chaos -- but others (wisely) may think differently.
Opinions to the list, please.

On the six o'clock start -- I had difficulty meeting that myself --
maybe in future we could have a 6-7 natter period, where folks swap
disks and try out personal stuff on the machines available; then meeting
proper from 7-9.  What think?

I was struck by just how many people there last night are interested
in Linux as a written media production tool -- not just the workaday
text-processing applications (Abiword; StarOffice; OpenOffice.org); but
production of presentations (MagicPoint; Kpresenter); and all-purpose
single-source text editing for delivery in multiple formats (TeX; LaTeX;
TeTeX; postscript; dvi; pdf; SG/HT/XML), using whatever editor comes to
hand.
Number-crunching, data-logging, data-mining, sifting and sorting,
equipment control, etc. didn't seem to be anyone's pre-occupation;
whereas teaching and text production did.  Hmmm.
Maybe that gives us a handle on future topics of group interest.

It was also quite forcibly brought to my attention that my view that 'a
Linux system' does not have to include sound, multi-media, or even a
working GUI is _*/NOT/*_ universally shared.  (More on The Great Debian
Laptop Installation in a separate mail.)  Mea culpa -- in my book, once
you've got a working command line, you're there -- everything else is
frills and icing, to be added at will.

So maybe we could organise install evenings too, so that people can get
rid of their fears that Linux is going to blow everything away [it is,
of course; but you get rid of the fear!] -- and people can try out
installing different distributions.  (I haven't installed a recent SuSE
for ages, for instance.)
Who's interested in what?  (Hey! we could even make it a tradition that
every meet begins with an install of Debian on Sean's laptop!  Great
idea!  Or .. thinking about it .. maybe not...)
Home networking?

Let's use the list to sort out what our interests are.

[Andy -- how are things going on the Acorn front?  One of the things
Leonard and I are really keen on is having one working example of Linux
on each of the eleven architectures supported -- i386 is no problem;
Acorn is our next target.  How's Paul getting on with the install?)

Regards to all, and thanks for a great evening,

Martin
(who has never said "ho-ho-ho" in his life.
But I quite fancy reindeers, tho'.)
--
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
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