VLUG Meeting Minutes 1999.11.09

Announcements

Andrew Willard began the meeting with his commercial minute, plugging the club's CD-ROM offerings. He noted that LinuxPPC is now the new "Q3" version, which'll be of interest to everyone with Mac or other PowerPC hardware.

Carl Constantine presented a few Linux-related announcements:

• The Microsoft finding of fact! We're still some distance away from a real decision in the case, but this is an important step. There's some talk of the DOJ taking the case directly to the Supreme Court, under a little-used exception clause that is applicable to antitrust suits.
• Slackware 7 is now final and being distributed
• The Corel licensing issue (source unavailable) has now been solved. UPDATE: since this meeting another Corel licensing issue has cropped up (underage downloaders) and that one is still unsolved.

Randy Esdon gave a partial list of the many local businesses that have agreed to give discounts to VLUG members. Matthew Skala announced that the meeting was being tape-recorded and would eventually be available on the Web in MP3 form. STATUS: I have the file encoded, but they're a little big for my modem. Stay tuned.

Chris Halsall spoke about Mark Elrod, active member of VLUG and many other local user groups, who passed away of a heart attack on October 29th. The meeting observed a moment of silence in Mark's memory.

Barbara Irwin, head of technical services at the Greater Victoria Public Library, spoke about the library's involvement with Linux. They have about 20 or 30 Linux books, but you won't find them if you look on the shelves because they're checked out all the time. She asked everyone with suggestions on which book the library should or shouldn't buy, to email her.

Further announcements from Carl and Chris: Chapters is now stocking Linux Magazine and Linux Journal as a regular offerings, no need to order them. Bolen Books has always had Linux Journal, and the News Store on Yates Street has it and many others including "the French one". There is a new IPO coming out called "Linux One"; much disdain was expressed towards it. VA Research will be going IPO soon. Linux Today will carry the story as soon as it happens. When Cobalt went IPO recently, the stock started at 14, was sold to the first round of buyers at 22, and was all the way up to 150 before it hit "the street".

Main presentation

Thomas McVeigh on Linux productivity office suites, with demos and discussion of most of the major ones.

BREAK

Further presentation

Chris added one additional announcement: the Board of Directors on behalf of the club purchased a 27G hard drive for the club's server, ladybug. As soon as some motherboard issues were sorted out, it would be put into service mirroring as many useful Linux sites as we could fit in. Please don't email us to say the server is down during the brief time that the server is down for the upgrade; we know!

Tom completed his presentation on office software, and Carl announced the topics for the next meeting: Squeak (SmallTalk development) and GnuPG (email security).

Adjourned

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