2000.09.05 Meeting Notes

News

• Interesting OS Opinion articles seen:
  • Copyright obsolete yet? -Napster, Gnutella, etc. problems.
  • Linux is NOT Communism (as Steve Balmer, president of Microsoft said), but Windows is Fascism! (government-subsidized corporation!)
  • Geek hypocrisy (sticking up for Napster but then abusing it by pirating)
  • Ease of use and user interface - dumbed-down is bad, m'kay?
  • QT libraries (GUI library for KDE) will be released under the GPL as of 2.2 (which is in its second beta release)

Committee Reports

• Demo - A cracking contest will be held soon. Henry will be setting up the machine that VA Linux donated to us with a standard install of Debian (potato) with all current security patches. The machine will have only an SMTP daemon, SSH daemon, and a webserver running on it. After two weeks, if noone can break into it, one additional network service (eg, FTP server) will be added per week. The winner will get some particular piece of swag from LUGOD. The machine will be nitro9.cocoranch.com. (Bonus points to anyone who knows what that's a reference to. Hints: British. Sci-Fi.)
• DCN - No new news.

• Other LUGs
  
  • SVLUG - 9/6 - Nate Oostendorp of Perk Monks and everything2.
  • SacLUG - 9/13 - Robin Gross, an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on the DeCSS case.
  • Roseville Linux Training Center - 9/16 - Installfest / Open House.

Other Business

• Financial Report - $69.52 was collected in voluntary donations.

• Yolo County Library - Jessica said she was searching for a book on Digital Unix at the Davis branch of the Yolo County Library (on 14th Street) and came up with nothing. A search for just "Unix" came up with only one book: "System V Primer" from 1987. A search for "Linux" also came up with only one book: "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Linux." We should consider donating books (or having publishers donate) to the library.

• Fry's - Fry's Electronics (in Sacramento) has been getting more and more Linux stuff lately. (For a while they had a Linux kiosk near the front entrance.) Bill suggested we (in cooperating with SacLUG) put together some flyers for Fry's to place by the Linux stuff, if they'd let us...

Presentation

• Micah Cowan continued explaining the basics of Perl.

Attendance

• Bill Kendrick
• Jen Rutherford
• Micah Cowan
• Will Waggoner
• Ankur Shah
• Susie Quach
• Jim
• Bill Albert
• Dalia
• Larry
• Dave
• Marlene
• Paul
• Winston
• Brian Su
• Bob George
• Mike Simons
• Mark Kim
• Drew Parsons
• Emily Stumpf
• Verbus Counts
• Steven Helms
• Alfredo
• .. and 6 others

Photos of this meeting