ILUG Cochin Minutes

[Shanu <shanu@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

        Here are the minutes of the just concluded meeting held on
Sunday, June 18. The meeting began as scheduled at 2PM and was attended
by 13 ppl. This was quite disappointing since for the previous meeting
we had 22 ppl which was the highest ever. Blame it on the weather! Read
on for the minutes.

        We started off with a formal introduction of all the attendees.
Once this was over the questions began to pour. For this month we didn't
have any specific agenda. We took up whatever the newbies wanted to
know.

        The first question asked was distribution related - what are
they and why are there so many of them. Ragu & I took turns in answering
them. There was no bias towards any particular distro. Unity in
diversity, we commented jokingly. Then Ragu gave a talk on the Open
source movement pioneered by Richard Stallman and others. During this
there was a considerable amount of M$ bashing.

        One of the better discussions we had was on hardware
compatibility issues. I explained in detail as to why Linux is facing
problems developing drivers for the latest hardware. Ppl were advised to
buy hardware which were Linux ready and a small list of Linux friendly
companies were enumerated namely 
Matrox,S3,Cisco,Intel and others. They were asked to keep away from win
modems and win printers.
        
        Selvan,who is a web designer, wanted to know the availability of
high quality audio & video editing software for Linux. His question went
unanswered as none of us had explored that area before. Can anyone with
similar interest enlighten us ? I will forward it to him.

        Sachin, another newbie reported reading about a new virus that
can attack Linux boxes. A smile came over our faces as we prepared to
reply to him.

        A lot of non Linux discussion took place. Mostly about the
present state of technology and what we can expect in the feature like
the new K7-Athlon.

        We disbanded after 2 hours of talks. There was a fully
configured RHL machine for the newbies to play around.


- -- Shanu

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - = = (SHANU) = = - -
  Shanker Balan                                Debian/GNU Linux 2.1
  St. Alberts College
  Cochin  India



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