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Next public meeting was Re: [LUG] Meeting to be booked by John.



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Tom Brough wrote:
|
| This is all true, and I have to admit attending 5 of the above myself

... and the list is incomplete.

| however one observation I would like to make is that I have noticed a
| tendency / trend towards limited time span between conception and
| implementation of meetings (some times weeks (as in 2) mostly
days. For
| example last Saturdays meeting was initially proposed by Simon on 21st
| (correct me if I am wrong but that is the earliest reference I could
| find) and implemented on the 28th that is to say a whole 7 days for
| people to get there acts together.

Sorry, I had intended to hold the meeting end of October, but Kai
said he was going away, and it would have been a shame to have a
Debian meet without him, which forced the deadline.

| A mad greek fellow

Crazy not mad ;) And he's come back down this way since then, so
maybe he ain't that crazy after all.

| My point however, is that I feel its time that we planned and
| co-ordinated something with the public (non-member) in mind, or given
| the vast area (in land mass) that DCGLUG covers compared with other
| GLUG's perhaps a roadshow taking in major venues in Devon and
Cornwall.

Unless anyone has great transport for it, I think a road show is
challenging, even HP use to have fun keeping their lorries on the
road, working, and demo'ing, and they spent big bucks on it.

We can materialise with a reasonable selection of laptops though -
and I think these days 99% of stuff can be demo'ed adequately on a
laptop, even things like LVM. Especially with members who now have
things like CD burners on laptops.

Anyone game for all turning up dressed the same for business like
events - be it a geeky teeshirt, or a suit? Tux ties....

Certainly I am happy to help produce equipment necessary to demo, or
install Debian, pretty much anywhere in the region, although West
Cornwall really is a bit far to drive for a single days meet from
Exeter, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Make it a weekend in
West Cornwall....

| And secondly perhaps its time to have an area on DCGLUG that
caters for
| "newbies"

I think splitting the list, even for simple questions, is a bad
idea. It hasn't worked for other things in the past. I don't see a
plethora of "daft" or "trivial" questions, and in my experience it
is precisely the most experienced who can answer the "daftest"
questions with the greatest clarity.

I also don't see a great deal of deep technical discussion on list
which would scare a beginner, and even if you don't understand all
of it you gleam bits of what is possible, and who can help. I mean
which of us would know Theo was a LARTC guru if he hadn't asked
questions we couldn't answer on it? So now when I get an interesting
advanced routing or traffic shaping issue I know who to email ;)


As regards "what can be done in a day" (from another thread), I think the answer is a lot more than could be done back in 2000.

With Matt's Debian mirror we had Debian going in bottlenecked only
by the archaic 10 Mbps hub on Saturday, in most cases both ends
could support 100Mbps, and we could have been pushing in an entire
CD's worth in a minute with a 100Mbps switch, the bottleneck became
how long before it ejects the netinst CD so I can move onto the next
PC (we only had a couple of boot CDs, but then we didn't do that
many installs, although a lot of upgrades, and looking at other
packages). No CD changes, no slow downloads, this is a very slick
way to install an OS on such events, and worked exceptionally well
on Saturday despite being the easiest of the things we set up for
the event (despite the two day download).

For Saturday I made a "plug and go" network, and despite a weird
glitch with DHCP, we were able to basically wheel in hub, cables,
server, wireless bridging device, and be doing Debian installs in a
matter of minutes, and also patching and burning over the wireless
LAN. Having people sort these issues first made life simpler all
around I think.

With LiveCDs we can see if someones PC is likely to work well with
GNU/Linux, and give them something to take away, in about as long as
it takes to boot a PC.

Oh and the people doing it have got better at it, well Mark, and
Matt, and Neil, and Neil, and many others have, I think I'm
beginning to ossify.

What I think is hardest is getting the layout of the meetings right.
I like lecture style meetings (perhaps I've been away from
University long enough). I learn quickest if someone explains that
stuff to me upfront, and then maybe I play with it after to make the
points concrete. I also like a clear structure, and well defined
roles for people. I think that many other members prefer a more
chaotic, lets install and play approach, maybe I'm a control freak ;)

Beyond UserLinux, I don't have any burning Debian topics to tell
people about, but the UserLinux story is a good one for business
users, and allows one to highlight ideas of freedom, and licences in
a natural way that is relevant to businesses. So sign me down as a
possible speaker/demonstrator, but I personally don't have the time,
or energy to organise another big meet before late spring 2005. But
happy to help if someone else can do one earlier - early December is
good for me.
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