VLUG Meeting Minutes 2000.06.13

Announcements

Chris Halsall opened the meeting at about 7pm, introducing Carl Constantine, who would be the presenter for the evening, and Matthew Skala, who did the usual count of attendees. Next, in the commercial moment, Chris issued an apology for the recent glitches in CD production. He said that the club was purchasing a CD burner of its own, and that should smooth things out a bit. Anyone who was still expecting a CD should let him know. Carl directed everyone to the club Web page for a list of the discounts available to members.

Chris ran through some of the recent news of interest to Linux users, which included:

• In a somewhat surprising move, the Court of Appeals agreed to hear an appeal on the Microsoft verdict, apparently preempting the possibility of the Justice Department taking it directly to the Supreme Court. Three of the ten Appeals court judges disqualified themselves for conflict of interest. The procedural details of this development, and its consequences, are still to be resolved.
• GNOME 2.0 is out, with various new and interesting features
• OpenMotif is now available free, so those who want Motif widgets no longer have to buy or steal the libraries.
• Linus is on vacation, but Alan Cox is releasing prereleases of the 2.4 kernel. The kernel hackers are making good progress, but they still have a long to-do list before the real release.
• The late-night hacking party spearheaded by Carl went off pretty well; the super-mysterious project topic turned out to be a four-player chess game called "Four-Play". Much amazement was expressed that we actually managed to get the domain name four-play.org. That Web site will have content Real Soon Now.
• Caveat Emptor for buyers of preinstalled Windows systems: many of them are now being shipped without Windows CDs. When you boot your machine up it demands that you insert N floppy disks to build the Windows distro; if you skip this step and your drive crashes, you may be an unhappy camper with no way to restore.

Presentation

Carl Constantine, on package management with Linux.

BREAK

Further Presentation

Chris handed out tickets for a raffle; the prizes included some Caldera tee shirts ("Nobody uses their distro, but they have cool tee shirts."), a red Red Hat hat, and some Linux-flavoured microwave popcorn. ("Linux Kernels".) Then Carl continued with his demos of various package management systems.

At the close of the presentation, there was a short discussion of when the next Installfest would be. Chris said probably the first week of July.

Adjourned

To Boston Pizza, for the usual refreshments.