[Glastonbury] re: first meeting

[steve]

Hi folks,

A big Thank You to all for coming along yesterday and making our first 
official meeting a success.

Many thanks also for your appreciative comments.
To get where we are now with the technology available to us and 
permission to go ahead with this "community project" has taken me over 2 
years of open source advocacy against all odds ;-) and yes we are now 
finally there.
Back last year in December, 2003 was voted the year of LINUX. Enough said.

Yes I agree a 6-7pm open time for those who want to and can be there 
(i'll be there anyway). Perhaps a small formal chat around 7pm based 
upon an "agenda"? agreed beforehand as to how to spend the next 2 hours 
until nine.

perchance for those that get thirsty (as i tend to) a couple of pints in 
the "who would have thought it" to carry on any advocacy or other 
linux/open source conversations may appeal to some.
indeed Duncan and I finished the evening in this way and ended up 
discussing Tarkovsky on DVD via a Linux box and the data projector....

The next meeting will be on the 2nd July therefore between 6 and 9pm.

A few points hanging over from April are below:


 >>>Please read the HOWTO for LUGs at
 >>>http://www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/User-Group-HOWTO.html

this may become formative as to how we organise ourselves.
at this stage i see no need for a committee but as we grow, a core of 
people who have the time and inclination may want to steer things.
i enjoy informality. however if we have a specific session on an agreed 
topic then a little forward planning won't do any harm.

last night was very efficient i thought. we had two groups looking at 
differning aspects of linux / open source applications as well as 
individuals exploring and reading. on top of this some very constructive 
sharing of ideas and making contact.
this was based purely on the needs that we all brought with us.
any way have a read and see if it sparks anything you may wish to share.

also i mentioned previously

 >>>>>Inviting other users to the group
please talk to people about the meeting and invite them along to the 
next one.
Duncan has offered his design skills to put together a flyer for our 
next meeting. tks.
The school will allow us to use its printing facility for this.

 >>>>>Timing of press release to coincide with first meeting
hmmm, i have to say i left this one with the Head at the school who 
overlooked us.
i therefore will personally invite the paper (gazette) to our next meeting.
it is probably better that they come along to the second meeting as now 
we know each other in this new context so i'm not annoyed about this.

 >>>>>BEOWULF and rendering
Martin mentioned a Beowulf at St. Dunstan's.
We have NOT got our performing arts bid this time so there will not be 
any money to support this.
I still think its a great idea well worth pursuing.
The acorn / retro-architecture project is exciting too. I would love to 
see this work.

 >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

On top iof these i wish to highlight:
MUSIC on Linux:
as i discussed with Tim the Rosegarden project 
(http://www.all-day-breakfast.com/rosegarden/) is one i am involved with 
as a musician. (alias ThinMan http://www.besonic.com/thinman)

i am pursuing sponsorship for between £1000-£1500 to pay for the 
Hardware to put on Download iso RedHat (9) Linux and Rosegarden as well 
as the Turnkey / AGNULA  installation which is for music and audio 
production. This machine will be made available to the local musicians 
via LUGOG as a demo machine and be used in school by students for their 
GCSE work. as yet no one has responded so any help with this will be 
apprecited. (we would be the first school in the UK to trial it).

WEB SKILLS
Duncan's idea for PHP, MySQL and Apache can all be demonstrated using a 
stand alone machine as 127.0.0.1 or localhost loopback. I too am very 
keen to move my limited experience forward on this. 2 contexts for these 
web skills are webdesign and ecommerce as well as a secure database for 
school administration.
Anyone know how to get these three working efficiently? If not we can 
have a learning together session.

INSTALLS and Programming (hacking):
yes Suse.
i have never seen SusE in all its glory due to its lack of iso availability.

i do like to work with the terminal too so tiny linux / peanut linux / 
gnu linux all are up for grabs as far as i am concerned.
these will set up old hardware much more efficiently than any X11 based 
distribution.
it would be great to set up a 386 running linux and c++/pyhton to 
demonstrate the basics of programming languages.

any way this mailing list is our forum until the 2nd july so please use it.
absolutely anything to do with open source and linux.

"arms open wide"
s~TV