FW: [Wylug-discuss] Future meetings.........

[Rik Wade]

On Thu, September 15, 2005 01:27, Towle, William wrote:

>   It might be useful if these can be worked around, though, or to
> support some other (largely read-only) documentation medium...?

I'm a strong believer in Wikis for community information resources and
couple of the LUGs here in New Zealand have adopted Wikis for their pages,
such as WLUG (http://www.wlug.org.nz). In many ways, the Wiki provides a
more persistent resource than a mailing list. The mantra of "search the
mailing list archives before posting a question" is wearing a bit thin now
that people are used to information on-tap from sites such as Google.
Wikis enable much closer collaboration between group members and can also
produce high quality articles due to the nature of peer review.

On a different note, the recent rise and demise of several Linux flavours
may be a suject for a newbie talk. When choosing a Linux distribution to
use, it's very easy to go for the one which claims that it is the "easiest
to use" "easiest to install" and "fastest growing" or that has the
"largest number of packages".

Those who have been using Linux for a number of years will be able to
recount many stories of the various distributions they've tried, what the
benefits and problems were with each one, and why they went back to
"Distribution X" or stayed with "Distribution Y".

Using various distributions is part of the learning experience, but it
would be interesting to hear "words from the wise" regarding distribution
choice.

There's nothing more annoying than becoming somewhat dependent on a
certain distribution only to find that they drop the free version, only
provide updates for two minor releases, start to fork in ways they
promised not to, or just fold/get bought/become un-trendy.

I don't mind doing the talk if WYLUG will fund the travel. OK, maybe not.
--
rik