VLUG Meeting Minutes 1999.10.12

Since this meeting included our 1999 Annual General Meeting, we started by distributing red voting tickets to all current members, and processing membership renewals for those whose memberships had recently expired. During this pre-meeting time we also sold tickets for the Big Tux Raffle.

Announcements

Carl "Captain Meeting" Constantine the meeting to order at 7:10, and immediately introduced Andrew Willard, who did his usual commercial moment. then Carl proceeded to the latest Linux news. Here are some of the high points:

• RedHat 6.1 released, with new GUI install process
• Slackware 6 released
• VA Linux going IPO
• VA and another large company commercializing Debian
• IBM and Intel backing TurboLinux

Randy Esdon listed some of the many discounts he'd secured for VLUG members. for the complete list, check the membership benefits web page.

Andrew read out an email the club had received from Stormix, looking for Linuxy C programmers, QA people, and suits. Email nicole@stormix.com or call 1-877-STORMIX for more info.

Chris Halsall spoke about the upcoming Installfest, to be from 10 to 4 on the 16th of October.

Annual General Meeting

Carl chaired a brief business meeting to perform the election of new directors and other necessary functions.

Andrew Willard was elected to the position of President, by acclaimation.

Chris Halsall was elected to the position of Vice-President, by acclaimation.

Thomas McVeigh was elected to the position of Treasurer, by acclaimation.

Matthew Skala was elected to the position of Secretary, by acclaimation.

Randy Esdon was elected to the position of Membership Director, by acclaimation.

Chris Halsall presented the unaudited financial statements. Due to problems recovering the financial data when the previous treasurer resigned, the financial statements as of the meeting date were sketchy.

MOTION: BIRT these statements be accepted, understanding that they'd be made more complete as the rest of the data became available. MOVED: Skala, SECONDED: Schneider, PASSED.

Additional Comments

Carl went over his policies on meeting presentations, and suggested everyone visit the "topics board" to suggest meeting topics or volunteer to give presentations. Chris talked about the upcoming Computer Show, where VLUG would be having a booth.

Break

Immediately after the break, Randy announced an additional discount he'd arranged during the break: corporate pricing for VLUG members, from JD Micro Devices.

Guru Panel

The presentation for the evening consisted of a "Guru Panel": Andrew, Chris, and Matthew cowering behind a table while the audience fired questions at them. The main questions and answers covered were:

The VLUG T-Shirt Project - current status?

Yes, it's still going on. Mark Elrod has the final design, and it looks really nifty. [NB: Since the date of the meeting, Mark has unfortunately passed away. The status of the t-shirt project is at this time unknown.]

When are we going to have VLUG SIGs?

As soon as someone wants to run one!

Trouble between versions 4.7 and 4.61 of Netscape under Mandrake

You have to uninstall the old Netscape. See documentation at klug.org.

What about virtual desktops and the pager in AfterStep?

It's basically down to however you want to configure your window manager. There was an extended discussion of some of the possible settings you could use.

I added another hard drive to my system; Windows sees it and Linux doesn't. Why?

It could be any of a lot of things. We discussed IDE configuration, which /dev/hd devices map to which drives, the possibility of a conflict with a CD drive. One suggestion: read "dmesg" to see the kernel startup messages.

How small a hard drive can I get away with installing Linux on? I want to use it as a proxy server.

You don't need a hard drive at all! See the mailing list archive for a discussion of single-floppy firewall/proxy/etc. packages.

How should I run my Windows programs?

Under Windows! We discussed dual booting, and for those who don't want to do that, we went through (in some detail) WINE, dosemu, VMware.

What's a good fax applications for Linux?

HylaFAX is popular. Also, a local programmer at gmsys.com has written a good one, and also a GLINT replacement.

Do I need separate software for GNOME and KDE?

Generally, no. Applications written for either one will run under the other, with at worst some loss of the advanced features the desktop environments provide. But if you use applications compiled for both, you might need some shared libraries from the one you don't use.

What's going to happen to RAM prices?

What are next week's winning Lotto numbers?

Help, I'm trapped in xdm under Mandrake 6.0!

Discussion of how to turn off xdm by editing the "id" line in /etc/inittab; that's the normal solution to this problem, but it appears that the person who asked this particular question was actually suffering from some kind of Voodoo3 misbehaviour that locked it in 640x480 mode with a bigger virtual desktop and no way of scrolling. The best suggestion was to get newer drivers.

I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get from X to text mode; how do I get back?

Ctrl-Alt-F7, or just Alt-F7. The first X display will normally go on virtual console 7; if you have another one, it'll be on 8, and so on.

I get a GPF [sic] when loading the PCMCIA modules. What can I do?

Unclear; some suggestions included getting the latest version of the PCMCIA software, tweaking the module loading process, and "ntsysv".

Adjourned

To Boston Pizza for the usual refreshments, around 9pm.