[Glastonbury] report on meeting - Jan 10th

[Martin Wheeler]

Well, our first meeting in the new venue went well -- thanks Ray, Phil, 
PeterL, Tony, Andrew (apologies from Ian and Greg).

Checking out the new equipment was fun -- we have 14 machines at our 
disposal, all P3 1000 MHz boxes, each with 256 Mb of memory -- all but 
one with 20 Gb hard drive (the odd man out having 40 Gb) -- and all 
booting up from the default settings of Ubuntu 5.10 no problem at all -- 
straight onto the local network, and out to the internet.

Even better, with machines set to DHCP, just plugging into a network 
socket enabled those who wanted to do so to plug their own machines into
the network and so get out to the net with their own preferred 
distribution -- whilst those with wireless enabled laptops found it very 
easy to use the wireless network to get straight out onto the net without 
needing to bring a CAT5 cable at all.

And with sockets galore all round the room (plus ample bench space), those 
who brought extension cables found they didn't really need them.

All in all, a very useful little exercise.  Doesn't look as if we'll have 
to set up our own wireless network interface after all - we've got all we 
need in place already.

And maybe -- just maybe -- if we play our cards right, we might persuade 
the Centre to let us install second hard drives in some of the machines 
[bootable from floppy only, natch] to demo a few different versions of our 
favourite OS.

Two welcome differences to the usual routine:
1) the teabreak (thanks for thinking of bringing biscuits, Ray);
2) the ability to take our time over things, without feeling hounded to 
get out for a deadline for someone else -- with the result that we overran 
until 9:30+.  It's very nice to know that as keyholders, we can leave when 
we feel like it.  A vast improvement, I feel.

The one note of sadness in the whole evening for me was the total absence 
of any members from Glastonbury.  Whether this was by accident or design, 
I do not know.  It would be sad to think that it was intentional however.

As we have the run of the teaching room on a regular basis, it was decided 
to try a *second* meeting each month -- this time on the FOURTH Tuesday -- 
and to use this for teaching the LPI syllabus [q.v.] in a slightly more 
formal setting.  A sort of 'Newbie Night' for command-line beginners, as 
it were.  The first of these meetings will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 24th, 
again at 19:00 - 21:00+

The next 'regular' meeting will of course be the second Tuesday of 
February [viz. St. Valentine's Day], Feb. 14th.

See you there.
(Somebody remember to bring coffee!  Non-teadrinkers almost died of 
thirst tonight! :)
-- 
Martin Wheeler   -   StarTEXT / AVALONIX - Glastonbury - BA6 9PH - England
mwheeler at startext.co.uk                http://www.startext.co.uk/mwheeler/
GPG pub key : 01269BEB  6CAD BFFB DB11 653E B1B7 C62B  AC93 0ED8 0126 9BEB
       - Share your knowledge. It's a way of achieving immortality. -