[Preston] A LUG needs a purpose

[Godwin Stewart]

On 11/07/2016 21:10, Mark Walton via Preston wrote:

> Which gets me to the real point of my note...would anyone on this 
> mailing list like to refresh the Preston LUG, have a get-together, 
> and maybe discuss such options as working with the schools, or any 
> other ideas that would give us a "raison d'etre" to overcome this 
> dormant state?

Morning all,

I suppose now is a good time to pipe up after a number of years lurking
around on this mailing list.

A bit of background: rather disenchanted with its susceptibility to any
and all forms of malware floating around at the time, I moved away from
Microsoft O/S'es in 1999 and started using GNU/Linux full time. Red Hat
first of all, then Slackware for a number of years, I rolled out my own
distro based on the LFS book and latterly, because I had less time to
tinker around and needed to be able to get on with things, used Ubuntu.

The pressures of work meant that I recently had to go back to the dark
side at home so I don't have any machines actually running GNU/Linux any
more although, rather ironically, using git for work I still use the
bash shell on Windows that comes with it as well as the Ubuntu
environment that comes with Windows 10 believe it or not. I also have a
few Amazon EC2 machines out there running Ubuntu Server 14.4 LTS.

A purpose in life is what holds a LUG together, there's no doubt about
that. If all you're going to do is meet occasionally, try new distros
over a $BEVERAGE and discuss the strong/weak points of them then things
are going to get stale pretty quickly. It's nice to know that they
exist, it's even nicer to be able to show those who otherwise have
little exposure to this kind of thing that they have a practical
application. Failure to grasp this on the part of my fellow LUG founder
members in Azay-le-Rideau (central France, I used to live there) is the
reason why the LUG fell apart.

Linux has been going for 25 years now and in that time it has gone from
strength to strength in its stability and in its hardware support. The
OSS community must be doing something right.

Doing something in schools is a good idea but I would issue a word of
caution. What schools do with IT equipment is dictated to them by
Central and Local Government. Government tends to do deals with
Microsoft because it's the "respectable" option with a company backing
it and Apple is just far too expensive. Schools also buy off-the-shelf
solutions with Windows pre-installed anyway. It'll be hard to get
through that shell because anything else has to be purchased with the
school's own budget and it's well known that schools don't actually have
a budget to spend.

All of this to say that a get-together one evening in Preston sounds
good to me. If I can make it... I work in Haslingden, live near
Southport and in my "spare" time (what's that?) I'm the Editor for a
16,000-strong service/social organisation (41 Club, ex-Round Tablers)
and I'm responsible for the Association's ICT.

-- 
Godwin Stewart -- <gstewart at bonivet.net>
72, Guinea Hall Lane, Banks, West Lancs PR9 8BT