VLUG Meeting Minutes 2000.01.11

Announcements

Carl Constantine welcomed us all to the first meeting of the year. Much to everyone's disappointment, the year 2000 rollover came and went without much incident. No throngs of joyous penguins storming through a shattered campus in Redmond or anything like that... but there's always next year.

In Linux news:

• The club server, ladybug, was upgraded with a 27G hard drive and some new RAM and stuff, and we're now mirroring some of the latest distributions, Perl, the LDP, etc.
• The 2.2.14 kernel is now out, the 2.4 series due in April.
• Shameless plug: Carl's written an article for the April 2000 issue of Maximum Linux.
• New version of XFree86, 3.3.6
• Caldera just announced their IPO, followed closely by LinuxCare (which is an extension of the Silicon Valley LUG).
• Inprise is open-sourcing Interbase 6.0
• Mozilla reached their "M12" milestone, and seems pretty stable.
• Opera beta now available; reports on stability are mixed, and the download is big even though the final browser that it builds is small. But it looks cool.

Andrew Willard did the usual merchandising song and dance. He noted that they're produced on demand, so you do have to order them online. The Web site is not up to date, but the CDs are up to date with the latest versions. He noted that the Tux case etching buy went very well, we actually got them twice the originally-agreed size at the same price, and we can easily do another round of that if people missed the first one. If you've any other ideas for cool group buys to do, let him know.

Randy Esdon announced some of the benefits and discounts available to members, from lots of computer stores, Internet service providers, book stores, and miscellaneous retailers. For a complete list, check our Web site. Matthew Skala did a quick census of the members and visitors present at the meeting.

Chris Halsall noted that nobody had signed up to represent the club at COMDEX in Vancouver, but there were passes available for anyone who wanted free admission to the show floor.

Presentation

Carl Constantine and Randy Esdon, on hardware

BREAK

Further Presentation

Carl and Randy continued their presentation on hardware. The handouts from this presentation are available on our Web site. They concluded with a little bit of general Q&A.

Adjourned

To Boston Pizza, for the usual refreshments.