[watford] Visit

[Matt Marsh]

>  > On Tuesday evening we will be meeting in the New Cavendish
>  > Street campus of Westminister University at 1900.
>  >
>  > Our speakers for the evening will be Jono Bacon and Ted Haeger.
>  >
>  > Jono Bacon works for Open Advantage in the West Midlands, is a
>  > journalist and a presenter on LUG Radio
>  >
>  > Ted Haeger works for Novell and is the presenter on the Novell
>  > Open Audio Podcast.
>  >
>  > The talk will be on Linux Advocacy...
>
> I may go along to this myself too.

Yesterday evening I attended this meeting of GLLUG, the first
LUG meeting I've been to, so I thought I'd report back...

The meeting there was reasonably attended with about 20 people
turning up. I had expected that there would be more but still
20 is not bad and they seemed a friendly bunch. Unfortunately
I had to head off before they went to the pub afterwards so
I didn't get to really speak with them. They have a nice setup
there at Westminster Uni, able to use one of the lecture
theatres with all its presentation kit and so on.

The first part of the evening by [1]Jono Bacon (of [2]LUGRadio
fame -- you all listen to that podcast right?) was about
open source advocacy - how to promote open source within
the organizations that we work for and so on. It did provoke
my thinking as to what more I can do to promote FOSS both
within working and non-working environments... I really
should do more. Perhaps this is something that we'll be
able to get involved in as a LUG at some point? Either by
doing things like attending computer fairs and manning a
stand (eg. the [3]infopoint project that Jono setup) or by
doing things like attending local colleges running computing
courses to promote the FOSS thinking there?

The second part of the evening by Ted Haeger of Novell
was basically a run through of the things they've been
building for OpenSuse. I've never tried Suse so it was
interesting to see what they've been upto. I might be
tempted to give it a go when the next release (10.1?)
comes out (sounds fairly imminant). I'll find a partition
to give it a go, but I think Ubuntu will still be my
distro of choice on the desktop for now...

Matt

[1] http://www.jonobacon.org/
[2] http://www.lugradio.org/
[3] http://infopointproject.org/

-- 
Matt N. Marsh
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