Ipswich Meeting Notes
All Ipswich Social Meetings were held at The Milestone Beer House, unless otherwise stated.
Next Social Meeting: 20:00 Monday 19 January 2009
Meet #11: 20:00 Mon 17 December 2007
Samwise, GregT, TracyD, Rick, PeteT, KeithJ, Mephi, DrJeep and Mike present at the meal, with Adam and Peter Weller (Welp) in the pub.
The December meet was a Christmas meal at Mr. Wing's on St. Helen's Street, round the corner from The Milestone.
We welcomed back both November's new attendees, Mike & Adam. Then we introduced the latter, along with the rest of us, to this month's newcomer, Gentoo enthusiast, Peter Weller. As the rest of us had booked into Mr. Wing's, we left these two to sweat over Adam's Compiz Fusion woes.
Before the drink set in, we discussed such geeky topics as preferred programmer's editors, which resulted in an interesting thread on the mailing list when we got home, Discuss: Favourite Text / Programmer's Editor.
The meal itself was great, we all revelled to excess and discussed many things probably best not published here. When we finally got back to the others in the pub, we had time for only one more round and a quick squizz at American McGee's Alice and Road Rash running under WINE, as well as Simon the Sorcerer 1 & 2 which Sam had embarrassingly failed to get running last month (leaving the CD at home indeed!).
Here's to the end of a successful year's LUGing!
Meet #10: 20:00 Mon 19 November 2007
Samwise, GregT, KeithJ, PeteT (eventually), Mephi, TracyD, Mike Eddington and Adam present.
We started by welcoming newcomers Mike and Adam to the fold. This month's meeting was an unstructured tour round the current state of play of gaming under Linux. PeteT provided a link to a somewhat dated LiveDVD distro, whilst Sam had cobbled together some of the better-looking games available to free software users - though he still struggled to get some of them to work exactly when he wanted. He did get them all up eventually, though (with the exception of Simon the Sorcerer 2 which wouldn't work because he left the CD at home. Eejit.). We went through some of the Linux classics (TuxRacer, Frozen Bubble), as well as some of the more modern releases like Alien Arena and the Quake family. Full list of games we looked at below, with many of the free ones usually proving easy to install from your favourite distro's software repositories. Overall, we agreed that Linux just isn't the gaming platform Windows is but it does have some great games available, especially if you have time to fiddle to get them working. Wireless internet in the pub now seems impossible to connect to, so no connection to IRC is likely in the immediate future. Mephis offered to try to put together a primer/tutorial on the use of Linux and free software within the field of astronomy and other telescope-related fun, for the new year. Attention turned to next month's meet and, contrary to the discussion on the mailing list a short while ago, the majority agreed that a Suffolk Xmas meal was a good idea. TracyD volunteered to co-ordinate the booking for the December meet ... Bravo! Please reply on the main mailing list, if you plan to attend.
Free (available from most distros' software repositories):
Alien Arena (2004) - popular free software, 3-D first-person shooter built on the Quake II engine.
Crack Attack (2000) - free OpenGL puzzle game inspired by Tetris Attack for the Super Nintendo.
Frozen Bubble (2003) - free Puzzle Bobble style game.
OpenArena (2005 - first test release) - popular free software, 3-D first-person shooter built on the Quake III Arena engine.
PlanetPenguin Racer (2005) - a descendant of the classic TuxRacer, which has itself been replaced by Extreme TuxRacer. The original TuxRacer is an OpenGL 3D racing game involving Tux the penguin, the Linux mascot, sliding down a snowy course as if he were a sled.
PrBoom (1998) - free source port of the engine for the legendary, genre-defining, 3-D first-person shoot-em-up, DOOM, running Freedoom (2003 - first beta release), a free IWAD file containing re-implemented game data.
ScummVM, the free SCUMM interpreter, running the now-freeware games Lure of the Temptress (1992), Beneath a Steel Sky (1994) and Flight of the Amazon Queen (1995)
Zoom, the free interactive fiction interpreter which can run various IF adventure formats such as Inform/Z-Code games, including Adventure aka Colossal Cave (1976), an Inform version of the legendary original 350 point version, Prof. Peter Killworth's Doomawangara Trilogy (CtD 1982/87, RtD 1988, LDoD 1990), an Inform port by the original author from 2000, IF Quake (1995), an Inform recreation of id Software's Quake and ZDungeon, a port to Inform of Dungeon, the more or less public domain version of the original MIT Zork.
Commercial:
PrBoom (1998) - free source port of the engine for the legendary, genre-defining, 3-D first-person shoot-em-up, DOOM, running Ultimate DOOM, Final DOOM and DOOM II.
Quake II (1997) - ground-breaking, 3-D first-person shoot-'em-up classic from id Software. Graphics engine source code GPL'd in 2001.
Quake III Arena (1999) - popular, multi-player, first-person 3D shooter, arena-based combat sequel. Graphics engine source code GPL'd in 2005.
ScummVM, the free SCUMM interpreter, running the commercial games Simon the Sorcerer (1993) and Simon the Sorcerer II: The Lion, the Wizard and the Wardrobe (1995) and many other adventure titles supported by ScummVM - or would have, if Samwise hadn't left the CD at home. D'oh!
Unreal Tournament (1999) - classic, multi-player, multi-game mode, first-person 3D shooter.
Commercial Games for Windows running under WINE:
American McGee's Alice (2000) - dark, stylish, third person shoot-'em-up based on the Quake III Arena engine. Set years after Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, American McGee's Alice features an older, more cynical and macabre incarnation of Alice.
Road Rash (1996) - a motorcycle-racing game in the third-person view, ported from the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, in which the player participates in violent illegal street races.
LiveCD/DVDs:
Games Knoppix LiveDVD 4.0.2-0.3 (14.09.2005)
Fedora 8 Games Spin LiveDVD (2007) - as suggested by Mike, this is the LiveDVD we should have been looking at, instead of the 2+ year old Knoppix release!
Upcoming Free Gaming Events:
Freedomware Gamefest 2007
Meet #9: 20:00 Mon 15 October 2007
Samwise, GregT, KeithJ, PeteT, Ruth Bygrave and Adam Reid present.
We had a break this week, after the run of tutorials we've had over the past few months. We happily dragged Adam into the fold - a first-time ALUG attendee who turned up to say Hello and introduce himself. Plus, this month also saw the welcome return of Ruth who was unfortunately unable to attend the last few meets. Adam brought us the news update that the wiki is now the index page of ALUG.org.uk. Hopefully, this should mean that it'll be easier for new LUGers to find up to date information on us which is good news.
Sam had an update on last month's virtual machines tutorial - he demonstrated the new seamless windows feature of the latest version of Innotek's VirtualBox OSE 1.5.0. This finally allows the seamless integration of any Windows application on to a Linux desktop, albeit it requires the purchase of a legitimate Windows license. Everyone suitably gushed at the prospect of Microsoft Outlook on their open source OS ... well, maybe not, but it did look very useful even tho there are clearly still a few bugs. Specifically, with the screen corruption when the last Windows app is minimised on a Compiz Fusion desktop and the cut and paste problems associated with the MS Office Clipboard (fixed in 1.5.2 Guest Additions software).
One of our roundabout chats ended up with us having a look at Google modifications, including GooGoth, a gothic version, and Blackle, a site which claims to be more eco-friendly because of it's use of a primarily black background rather that Google's traditional white.
Sam and Greg briefly discussed the practical feasibility of using ODF as an open standard for document interchange within a large commercial organisation. The consensus there was that commercial realities do require near-perfect interoperability with other entities who will almost certainly be running MS Office, in some form, and the Sun and Microsoft funded plugins available today, just aren't quite that good. Sam agreed with this, but was of the opinion that the OpenDocument Foundation ODF daVinci plugin for MS Office should provide seamless interoperability when it was finally released. Without reaching a satisfactory agreement, discussion moved on. Unfortunately for Sam, he was forced to report to the main mailing list a few days later, that work on the ODF daVinci plugin had ended, due to perceived limitations of the ODF standard. The OpenDocument Foundation have claimed they will not continue work on the ODF version of daVinci until their proposed ODFiX extensions are standardised. Instead, they have switched to using the W3C's Compound Document Format (CDF), which they claim will provide the 100% perfect "round trip" conversion fidelity they are aiming for. 1-0. Bad luck, Sam.
As the meet drew to a close, we talked about what we'd like to see next week. For lack of any better ideas, and because we had touched on retro gaming again - Manic Miner, Chuckie Egg and the like, Sam and PeteT were given the task of investigating gaming under Linux and reporting back next month, which should make for interesting results.
Meet #8: 20:00 Mon 17 September 2007
Samwise, James Freer, Matt (Mephi), GregT, KeithJ, Elizabeth Concu, Peter Clarke and JoeD (tardy) present.
Download the OpenDocument handout for this month's virtual machines tutorial
An enthusiastic turn-out for the tutorial by Samwise on virtual machines that was requested last month. Unfortunately, the evening was a bit theory-heavy because there's not a lot to be seen, as far as running a virtual machine goes. Instead, Samwise tried to uncloud the rather murky waters of virtual machines. He started from basic principles, describing an emulator and how it worked before describing the evolution of such software into the varying types of virtualisation that are currently in use. Along the way, we learned which applications fit into which category, thus making it easier to find comparable products and work out which solution might best fit our own circumstances. After covering the main strands of virtualisation, Sam briefly covered other applications in similar spaces and what niche they had carved - such as WINE, which is neither an emulator or a virtualisation solution but can run certain Windows apps with varying degrees of success. Amidst the discussion of system virtualisation, it was pointed out that there can be problems of clock drifting within a guest OS, which NTP may not be able to get around. Similarly, problems regarding the use of USB devices were reported and debated. After getting an overview of the virtualisation space, Sam moved on to a comparison between three of the top Hardware/System Virtualisation products which are a) free and b) for use on a Linux host's desktop. We heard about the various positive and negative features of two VMware products, VMware Player & VMware Server and also a less prolific rival, Innotek's VirtualBox. They were each designed with slightly different goals, and Sam explained the differences between them and then described roughly the installation process for each and provided links for various tutorials on the net covering a variety of distributions. At the end of the round-up, Sam fired up VMware Player and loaded up a .VMX machine of Ubuntu, an Official Ubuntu "Appliance" provided direct from Ubuntu. Then we had a look at the Open Source Edition of VirtualBox, which was running Microsoft Windows XP Professional. Finally, Sam offered up the opportunity to see the latest build of SDLMESS, the Multiple Emulator Super System, emulating the classic BBC Micro Model B. A unique ending to what was generally agreed was a very useful tutorial.
A busy month for Sam, as he also managed to bring along his working build of Compiz Fusion - the replacement for the 3D desktop eye-candy provider, Beryl - and thus bringing back one of the most oft-requested demos we've had since we started up the Ipswich meets again! This time, the new 64-bit laptop was capable of performing the funky snow, water and fire effects as well as the usual funky cube stuff. Bravo, the return of an old friend.
We did show our faces on IRC again, but with the tutorial running off the same laptop, we didn't settle in as well as we'd have liked. We had lots of discussions and follow-ups after the tutorial - James brought up that he'd like to see a kit meet, though not necessarily as far out as Syleham. We resolved to bring this up on the mailing list. We talked about a tutorial for next month but decided eventually we'd take a breather and just have a social meet, next time, given that we've done a few tutorials on the trot and we're running out of topic ideas and potential volunteers!
Meet #7: 20:00 Mon 20 August 2007
Samwise, KeithJ, Wayne Stallwood (DrJeep), Elizabeth Concu, Peter Clarke, PeteT and TracyD present.
Attendance was lighter on the ground today than expected, considering we had Wayne's highly-anticipated video / DVD creation demonstration to look forward to. We waited a bit to see if there were any stragglers, before diving straight in - Wayne had organised a lot to cover!
Starting with the GTK+-based Kino, Wayne explained the theory of how to transfer movies from a video camera and then how to setup a new Kino project. We talked about the scope, features and limitations of Kino and how the Cinelerra-CV application can provide more functionality, at the cost of added complexity. Wayne then started his walk-through in Kino with a clip taken from a classic cars rally and demonstrated how to apply built-in video filters like Sepia or external ones such as the Aged TV effects using the pipe filter in Kino to access a command line front-end video effects processing utility, ppmfilter (part of the SMIL Utils collection). Whilst waiting for the video to render Wayne explained how the ordering of multiple filters could have an impact on the final result. After creating a suitably impressive video snippet, Wayne also demonstrated how to add a loop of AC3 surround audio music to run alongside it (although standard PCM audio is also supported). Wayne showed us how to export the video in a variety of formats, including some which could be uploaded to YouTube (.wmv, .avi, .mov, and .mpg), as well as MPEG-2 which we needed to build a DVD. Wayne then quickly demonstrated how a photo slideshow could be created with dvd-slideshowand demonstrated how in the past he had also used this tool to create credits. Finally, we were introduced to Q DVD-Author which is a rather nifty QT-based front-end to the command line dvdauthor set of tools. Wayne showed us how to set up a DVD menu, using text, video clip stills or images as links on top of a still or video background loop complete with looping menu music (qdvdauthor claims to support a variety of sound formats for this but in reality only AC3 seems to work) , as well as discussing the underlying use of an XML file by dvdauthor which can be manually tweaked to provide even more control. About 90 mins in and we were all suitably gushing, when the generated VOBs and IFOs were burned to disc with the QT-based GUI app K3b and then loaded into MPlayer, where it ran like a charm.
Many thanks to Wayne for one of the most well-prepared walk-throughs we've had to date. We did briefly hop onto IRC, but the demo material was so engaging for so long, we didn't get chance to say more than Hi to the online denizens of #ALUG. We talked about what we'd like to look at next month and after going through a number of possibilities, we settled on Samwise doing a definitive coverage of Virtual Machines. This will definitely include VMWare and VirtualBox, possibly Xen or KVM and, maybe, M.E.S.S.. He breathed a sigh of relief after ppl were threatening to ask for a Compiz Fusion tutorial - which couldn't've ended well, given his laptop was already demonstrating throughout the evening how it's not playing well with it at all, atm - failing to paint windows completely unless they are resized, making it totally useless!
Meet #6: 20:00 Mon 16 July 2007
Samwise, KeithJ, Wayne Stallwood (DrJeep), James Freer, GregT, Matt (Mephi) and TracyD present.
To begin with, we were all saddened to hear that Sam's humour-inducing laptop had finally given up the ghost. Instead, he brought along a brand-spanking new 64-bit beastie, capable of running Blender with ease. At no point throughout the evening did anybody have their fingers smashed or their pint spilled by it. However, in an obvious attempt to regain the lost hilarity associated with his laptop, Sam admitted there was to be no wireless access from him as, despite only having had it for a little over a day, he had been forced to book it in for a mainboard replacement to fix the built-in wi-fi. Rubbish! Wayne continued the wireless palava theme by failing miserably to connect his laptop to the wi-fi access point, either. D'oh! No link-up to the #ALUG IRC channel, this month!
Unfortunately, we discovered from Wayne that Teatime's anticipated Blender tutorial had been cancelled at the eleventh hour, thanks in part to quinophex's car looking distinctly ropey earlier in the week. Mephi did fire up Blender on the spanky new laptop and, even without internet access, he was able to knock up a monkey ... errr ... using the supplied Blender examples(!)
Given the unexpected change of plan, we didn't have a fallback demo so we fell back to a few good hours of techy talk. Special prize goes to Tracy for not complaining even after we reached some really geeky levels.
We started off talking about a number of cool open source devices which seem to be hitting the market at the moment. Wayne broke out his GP2X and showed off the multiple emulators and game ports he had installed, including Beats of Rage and various Neo-Geo software. Samwise was disturbingly excited over finally getting his hands on Neil Crutchlow's Chuckie Egg GP2X remake. We also segued on to the new iPhone from Apple and whether it was worth the hype and/or would be linux-compatible.
Mephi suggested we check out the online bargain basements because, since it's successor's release, the Nokia N770 Internet Tablet has now reached as low as £80 on eBay, which is something of a bargain considering it's capabilities.
We went on to Facebook and discussed the pros and cons again and also discussed some of our loved and hated Facebook apps. In the former category, Greg pointed us to Map Your Friends, which provides an embedded Google map of your friends' locations around the world and Last.fm Music which turns your Facebook 'favorite music' into a radio station, lets you Listen to full-length tracks of your friends' favourite artists, show off your own, and measure compatibility with the taste-o-meter. All for free!. Most hated app so far seems to be Zombies, for which a special level of Hell has been reserved! We complained a bit about the general lack of UK (or even non-US) localisation support and Wayne, especially, had a rant about the verification function not accepting his UK mobile number. Someone must have been listening, as Greg posted to the main ALUG list that he discovered it worked, the following evening!
Next week's tutorial will be on GNU/Linux video editing, dvd production etc., and will be provided, ably I'm sure, by Wayne.
Meet #5: 20:00 Mon 18 June 2007
Samwise, PeteT, Venura, GregT, Eli, JoeD, Matthew Holland, Ruth Bygrave, Wayne Stallwood (DrJeep), TracyD and Laurie present.
We started the evening off with a crisis. Disaster seemed to ring in PeteT's ears as he arrived to hear that the Milestone's wireless router had expired a couple of days previously. Luckily, the landlord's brother in Edinburgh was remotely configuring a new router while we waited and managed to get our access restored only ten minutes after the meet started. Many thanks, therefore, to the Milestone owners and our remote repairer, Darren. PeteT took advantage of the spare minutes to get used to the idiosyncrasies of Samwise's laptop, which seems to have a mind of it's own and will try to smash glasses or bite the user's hands off every chance it gets. Meanwhile, the rest of us welcomed our newest meet visitors, Matthew and Ruth, who fit right in.
Ruth explained how she was delighted to find us, coming from a Mac world with a Windows-using partner and, seemingly, surrounded by people who dislike shell scripting, including the expensive local Mac User Group! We happily pointed out that even if our advice didn't help her much either, at least it's like the software we use - entirely free!
After the network problems settled down, PeteT settled down to running through basic GIMP actions as well as can be expected in a pub, with a rowdy audience! As is now customary, we signed into the ALUG IRC channel - though, as the laptop was in use, Eli had to use her phone as the client. Thankfully for Pete, it was Samwise who drew most of the flak on IRC for the dubious nature of some of the pictures found on his work laptop ... (see below).
Only one problem had been pre-submitted on the mailing list (and also brought up last month) - Tracy provided a picture of her cat which she wanted to change the background of. PeteT explained how to split the picture of the cat into two layers, so the cat was a distinct layer. This allows the background colour to be replaced with another colour or pattern. Moving on from this, PeteT took a background picture lurking on Sam's laptop and copied the layer, so that the cat was in front of the new picture, and then flipped the cat's layer left -> right to make the layers fit together better. We then segued over to a new task provided on the night by JoeD - how to create a simple button for a webpage. With a little working-out time, PeteT was able to show us how to create a rectangle with rounded corners, colour it in and then add suitable text to make a simple, appealing button.
By this time, we brought the tutorial to a close and let those interested have a play with GIMP on the images that Pete had been working on. The final result of which, led chiefly by JoeD, was the complete integration of Tracy's cat, Dodo, into the picture found on Pete's laptop - quite an impressive feat for novices, given the circumstances, as you'll see below.
We had a big discussion on what subjects we'd like to see covered in future tutorials. The idea is that we decide as a group, what we'd like to hear about and then find a volunteer to explore the topic over the next month - this doesn't have to be someone who is already an expert on the topic, apart from the most complicated programs, most of the time it just needs someone willing to have a play. If everyone takes a turn, it should mean people shouldn't have to step up more than once or twice a year. We added MythTV and printer sharing with CUPS to Samwise's list of possible topics, tho it might require a kit meet to get the most out of these two. As far as next month goes, Wayne thinks he may be able to sort someone out (Teatime) to give us a quick Blender run-through. If that falls through, we'll fall back on the second choice (as Blender might take a newbie quite a while to get up to speed on) of a Windows Interoperability tutorial, covering Samba and WINE and maybe NTFS-3G in FUSE. Wayne also offered to do a video editing and YouTube publishing demo in August, to give us an idea on what we can do with our home movies!
Samwise handed round issue 72 of Linux User & Developer magazine which had a great article, Free house, on how to run a pub entirely on free open source software. There was also a discussion on whether the Qwerty keyboard layout was actually designed to slow typists or not - opinion on the night was as split as the Wikipedia Qwerty entry.
We discussed Linux Advocacy and whether we wanted to actively "push" free software on new users. General consensus was that those who would be most receptive, are likely to find us on their own. Samwise has agreed to keep a copy of the ISO images for TheOpenCD, a Windows collection of free software, and Knoppix, a Linux LiveCD, which can be burnt on demand at the Social Meetings if new people turn up, or if someone wants one to pass one on to potential new users.
One of the other long-standing problems which have been discussed since the first public Ipswich meet this year, was Tracy's problems using her MP3 player with Linux. Over the past few months, we've got to the point where it sounded like a standard MP3 player which should work without much trouble, though whether it actually supported OGG files (as the marketing bumpf and distributor would have us believe) was still up for question. For the first time, Tracy was able to bring the player in so, whilst Sam's laptop was being playing host to GIMP, we were able to plug the MP3 player into Wayne's laptop. Initial thoughts from Tracy were that it was actually dead, as we were unable to start it. Luckily, after plugging it's USB cable in and letting it charge for a while, we were able to boot it. With some experimentation, we were able to confirm the device was working fine, though the current firmware was limited to about 8 characters for folder names and OGG files did not appear to be supported. We were unable to find any firmware updates online for it, as it's not a big name player, but Tracy went away happy enough, after we showed her how to use SoundConverter (Gnome) or soundKonverter (KDE) to convert her OGGs to MP3s, which could be used on the player.
Finally, we decided to try out a new feature this month - and start up a monthly challenge to encourage us all to experiment with new ideas we might not have played with otherwise. Samwise kicked off this month with three suggestions (join a Social Network site, spend a day without using the top five search engines, spend a day using Dvorak), from which we decided on:
June mini-challenge
- Sign up to social networking site Facebook.com. Post your Facebook email address / id to the main list, and we'll see how useful the site is for our little community.
For those who are already Facebook users, try one of the other suggestions such as
- a day without using the top five search engines: Google, Yahoo!, MSN / Windows Live, Ask or AOL (some alternatives to get you started are: http://www.kartoo.com/, http://www.quintura.com/ and the latest list of the top 100 alternative search engines)
- or a day using the Dvorak keyboard layout: http://www.dvzine.org/.
Meet #4: 20:00 Mon 21 May 2007
Samwise, PeteT, Venura, KeithJ, Will Loggie, GregT, Matt (Mephi), Yvonne and TracyD present.
We had yet another look at Beryl (a popular, recurring feature!), as part of a welcome for our newest members. This surprised Samwise somewhat as it had seemingly disappeared from his laptop, since we last looked at it. Luckily, a few hectic minutes on the internet got it running again, though we couldn't remember half the shortcut keys once we'd shown off the desktop cube stuff. 
We took the decision to run some shortish tutorials at the start of each meeting so, after casting around for suitable volunteers, PeteT volunteered (has been volunteered?) to run a GIMP tutorial next month after a goodly number of us agreed that we struggled with even the most basic GIMP tasks, after being used to Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro. Amongst the random conversations going on this evening, Mephi disgusted those in earshot by describing Steve, Don't Eat It!. Don't click the link, if your stomach is of the delicate persuasion!
Meet #3: 20:00 Mon 16 Apr 2007
Samwise, JoeD (aka Birdkiller) and TracyD present.
Plenty of apologies this week from non-attendees contributed to a low turn-out this week, not helped by Samwise not being around to email last week. Shame on him for not organising a stand-in. We joined the IRC channel until the laptop battery kicked us out. We chatted about various home geek projects including the feasibility of developing a fully featured, yet user-friendly, cross-platform VoIP client from home. Tracey's employer has yet to provide the Vista laptop promised last month, so no linux-related fun there or with the MP3 player which has also caused her grief recently but she forgot to bring along - maybe next time. We also played with the new release of SDLMAME, the Arcade Machine Emulator, and laughed at JoeD's excitement over his quick death at Galaxian! Moved on to playing a modern port of the first-ever text adventure, Colossal Cave, in a Z-Machine interpreter. Enjoyable, but we were doomed to fail after JoeD killed off the helpless, little bird we came across much to everyone else's annoyance!
Meet #2: 20:00 Mon 19 March 2007
Second public meeting. KeithJ, TracyD, Venura, Eli and Laurie present.
Samwise wasn't here but his laptop was. We had a quick play with Beryl and them some fun trying to get the wifi to work. We also joined the ALUG IRC channel. This led to some rather amusing conversations and we might consider doing it at every meeting. Some discussion regarding conversion of .ogg to .mp3. Keith helped Tracy with some CLI hints. Eli suggested we have a look at the planet Alug RSS agregator.Tracy is going to bring in her new vista laptop to the next meeting so we can put a sensible operating system on it. Venura agreed to install windows xp on Sam's laptop
Meet #1: 20:00 Mon 19 Feb 2007
First public meeting. Samwise, JoeD, KeithJ, TracyD, Matt (Mephi), Peter Onion, Chris Green, Venura, PeteT, Greg Thomas and Laurie present.
Mainly a meet-and-greet to introduce everyone. Went round the table and discussed everyone's backgrounds. Agreement on wiki idea and, if ALUG cannot provide this, an Ipswich-based wiki will be set up. Discussed various ways to make use of one, including monthly challenges and library page. Lively debate over the possible benefits of an additional forum. Conclusion to ask again later, after concerns that we should only have one - mailing list or forum - and the former is well established. Idea to see what people think a few months down the line. Raise the possibility of setting up kit meet next month. Sam to get wiki up and running (either under ALUG brand or iPlug).
Meet #0: 20:00 Thurs 18 Jan 2007
Planning meeting held at The Great White Horse. Samwise, PeteT, JoeD, RichardN and Venura present.
Discussed what we'd like to get out of a LUG, including meet and web ideas. Plan agreed is to setup a wiki and mailing list and then publicise the next meeting to get as many new members as possible. Sam to investigate website/list and investigate ALUG to see if they can offer us the infrastructure we hope for and whether they still cover Suffolk (ALUG website is noticably out-of-date and mentions only recent Norwich-based activities). Sam to create a single web-page with details and then publicise it on ALUG and his employer's internal newsgroups.