[Glastonbury] meetings

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Tue, Dec 21, 2004 at 11:09:10AM +0000, Greg Browne wrote:
> Tim,
> I'd be interested in those - plus how about a couple or so for newbies - 
> 1. discussion of distros, pros and cons (or have we had enough of that), 

What would be more interesting would be an install fest - everyone has
to install a different distribution from the one they're used to on a 
spare machine and configure it.  That would be an interesting comparison
- it's also a fairly good demo of how alike most distributions are once
you get away from ready-made GUI tools :) It might be worth running
through the installs for SuSE Personal / Debian / Mandrake / Fedora
anyway.

> 2. package and hardware installation - overcoming common difficulties,

What package installation problems - dependency problems are about the
only thing I find these days?  Hardware - with the possible exception 
of wireless cards and the most up to date graphics cards - is more or
less straightforward at least as far as I find it recently.

> 3. simple networks and common network problems

Hard to do: a lot of people just plug in an ADSL router and pray hard.
If you want an in-depth tutorial, I'm sure Martin or I could oblige
on debugging with traceroute / dig / nslookup and how to use nmap to 
sort out which ports are open on localhost :)

> or maybe just an introduction as to how to find the right 'how toos'
> 
www.tldp.org. Under Debian/Kanotix, apt-get install doc-linux-text /
doc-linux-html and go to /usr/share/doc. You may also want to install
dwww if you have Apache on the machine.

> Is anyone able to talk on, or does anyone want to hear about:
> 1. LINUX, a desktop replacement or desktop partner for 2005?

Substitue 1998 for 2005 and you're about right :)

> 2. Top 3 favourite software maintenance tools and essential maintenance

Define maintenance - do you mean package installation - apt-get, dpkg,
dselect - or system config file/log maintenance and inspection - vi/less, grep, locate - or real software building - make, autoconf, automake ??

> 3. Mail servers, how to set up a simple mail server for home/SOHO use
> with spam and anti-virus tools
> 
apt-get install postfix, apt-get install clamav - should get you started
:)

> It would be nice to think that I'll have learned enough by mid 2005,
> to introduce one of the topics, if wanted
> 
> Greg
> 
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