2000.08.01 Meeting Notes

News

• SuSE 7.0 and RedHat 7.0 beta are out
• KDE 2.0 beta is out
• 150 gnomes found on the steps of Australia's central bank before the bank'sboard had their monthly policy making meeting. They were glued to the steps and it took most of the day to get rid of them.
• DefCon 8 held in Las Vegas. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence Arthur C. Money spoke there, and said that 10% of the entire DOD budget goes to investigating hack attempts on the DOD.
• Tom's Hardware reports the 1.36HzPIII sucks (big surprise). Most apparently missing microcode needed to run at that speed.
• USPS thinking of providing free e-mail accounts to 120 million U.S. houses.
• Hotmail is about to collapse under the load. ;) They have migrated to Microsoft OS. 5-10% are run from Windows 2000, and 90-95% run by Free BSD/Apache platform (which is what HotMail ran from the beginning, before MS bought them).
• There was an article in the EE Times about the possibility of integrating bacteria into semiconductors at SUNY Buffalo. They harness a particular bacterium's photosensitivity to create an optoelectronic switching element.
• Researchers at Maryland subjected bacteria to extreme vacuum and UV radiation of space and found they could survive the ordeal. This seems to lend credence to the idea that life on Earth may have come from extraterrestrial meteors.
• CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) announced that the House passed an anti-spam bill, passed 427-1! Check http://www.cauce.org/hr-3113.pdf
• Bill got mentioned in a Japanese Linux magazine!
• What do LUGOD members use? Total as of July 15: Red Hat- 52, Slackware 8, Corel 2, SuSE 8, Caldera 8, Linux PPC 2, Yellow Dog 1, Debian 12, Mandrake 9, Open Linux 2, Linux Router Project 1, Free BSD 3.
• "FEATURE" vanity license plate on a VW Bug.
• Jackie Chan played a sysadmin on SNL. Good quote: "We've gotta make like MicroSoft... and split!"
• Sky Show will be held August 4 and 5, special talk by Seth Shostak of SETI.
• IBM mainframe computers are inexpensive now, they offer a 65% discount if you run Linux.

Committee Reports

• Demo - Our last demo at the Co-op went ok, we had a photographer from the Davis Enterprise there for a future article. We handed out copies of Turbo Linux. The next demo will be on August 26, probably at Borders. Henry will announce it to the list. Co-op now wants a Linux server to replace their NT one. Z-World donated a hub to LUGOD!

• DCN - Have yet to hear back from Richard.
• Installfests - None for the foreseeable future, Pete's very busy.
• LERT - Two calls made. $32 donated.
• Other LUGs
  • August 2- SVLUG in San Jose, with a talk on "Eazel."
  • August 8- NBLUG in Sebastopol, the talk for the night is "IP Service Clustering."
  • August 9- SacLUG, "Dynamic Websites using Databases."
  • August 15- BALUG in SF, speaker is a developer of a new Linux distro.
  • August 21- LUGOD, with Micah Cowan talking about PERL Basics.

Other Business

• Financial Report - $44.71 was collected in voluntary donations.

• HOWTO - Jessica suggested the idea of having a committee that will put the how-to's into a package. This should be brought up at the next meeting.
• UCDPPP - Pete Salzman demonstrated his UCD PPP installer script.
• GUI - Bill Kendrick briefly explained the difference between GUI's, toolkits, window managers and desktop managers.

Presentation

• Bill Kendrick talked about his "cgi-util" programming library for C. It lets you create web CGI programs easily.

  Notes available

Attendance

• Bill Kendrick
• Jen Rutherford
• Pete Salzman
• Rhonda Bailey
• Henry House
• Joel Baumert
• Jim
• Evan Scarisbrick
• Jessica Luedtke
• Roland Minden
• Jean
• Julie
• Enrico
• Jeff
• Dave
• Mohamed
• Stephen Helms
• Mark Kim
• Eric Engelhard
• .. and 3 others