VLUG Meeting Minutes 1999.03.09

Announcements

Chris called the meeting to order at 7:07, and started by asking for volunteers to help write documentation for VIFA's X-based client machine project. He collected a list of names of people willing to help. The next big announcement was that Gerald Crimp had attended LinuxWorld (the lucky swine!) and would be presenting some of his impressions along with raffle prizes later in the meeting.

Andrew did his regular commercial break, noting that we're almost out of the small and medium Tuxen, so this could be the last chance to buy until the next bulk order. As a special deal for this meeting only, Debian 2.0 CDs were priced at $5. The other CDs were at the usual price of $10.

Presentation

Tom McVeigh started his presentation on Linux kernel config and compile, with live demonstrations.

Break

Further presentation

Tom finished the kernel, and Mike Thorpe took over. He didn't have time for a complete presentation on the command of the month, (tar - the Unix tape archiver), but left us with a bit of homework for next meeting. See if you can figure out what this does:

tar cf - . | (cd /where ; tar xf -)

Gerald presented some impressions from his exciting trip to LinuxWorld. The Debian booth (which he was helping staff) was busy throughout the conference; it was also right next to the Slashdot booth. He got to meet Linus for a few seconds, long enough to get a picture taken of them together. Linus, in person, is "a nice guy, very humble". Gerald's photos were exhibited, and promised to appear on the Web site shortly. Some of the big names at the conference: Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, Corel. Bill Gates even put in an appearance, with two police officers acting as bodyguards. The cops were real.

Gerald brought back many goodies from the conference, ranging from stickers to CDs to magazines to Linux license plates. Free raffle tickets were distributed to everyone, and the goodies were duly distributed.

Questions and Answers

Y2K issues: Linux itself won't break, some apps could break. Of course, if you're talking to other machines on a network and they break, you won't be able to talk to them even though your computer isn't broken. Someone brought up the issue of BIOS clocks not being Y2K compliant; no decision at the meeting.

General discussion of Netscape under Linux.

Further comments and points on kernel compiling. (Yes, this is the bit where my notes go fuzzy.)

The "bzip" program: what is it, what's it good for, is it worth using?

Adjourned

At 9:30, a little later than usual, to Boston Pizza for the usual refreshments.