Minutes for meeting of the ICU Linux User Group on Friday, October 21st 1999
The meeting was held at 13:00 in Southside upper lounge.
Again, the Secretary failed to bring them. But there was one mistake which has been corrected.
Nothing 'arising' this week.
The date for the second Linux Seminar / Symposium / whatever will be Wednesday, December 1st 1999.
Maybe we should print out notes for talks and hand them out. That way, people have something to take home with them. This would however be quite expensive. Maybe we could put the notes on the web, and hand out a single scrap of paper with URLs. It would not be practical to cover our costs by charging tiny amounts for each handout. We could find a sponsor to pay for things like this. In total, we'll probably need about 100 pounds.
Sunny Chan will be able to help; he could do his Samba talk, or alternatively another Applications talk, provided the apps covered are different to last year's; maybe LyX, WordPerfect, and games.
Mike Wyer will talk about maintaining a large network, mostly in general, but also mentioning the tools that DoC are using. We will do another Linux installation, but different from last year's; this can be part of Mike's talk, since dualboot kickstart installs are part of DoC's setup.
Letty might be able to talk about scientific applications, and would be happy to evangelize LaTeX.
Richard might do a presentation on security, although this overlaps with Mike's talk.
Once outlines for the various talks are worked out, people can send them to the list for review.
Which room shall we have? We could go for 308 (last year's venue) and the neighbouring 311, joined by a doorway. Then we could have two parallel streams, with people flitting between them. (But how would we fill all that space? It's not feasible to have two concurrent talks.) It would be cool to have the nearby Systems Engineering Studios, equipped with 13 flat-screen PCs, but we'd need to spend time setting up demos that people can play with. 13 PCs isn't ideal, but it's better than none. Mike will find out whether we can get our hands on the room.
We can't go outside departments, as that costs money.
Henry will book the room, and talk with DoCSoc to find if they want to tag along.
We have enough on our plate at the moment, so any smaller, specialized seminars will be held next term.
Sunny will beg for books from publishers for our library, which is run by Matthijs. The system is simple - you must be an LUG member to borrow books, you mail Matthijs and sign for the book when you borrow it. Requiring a deposit is not necessary, since we can easily chase up debts within college.
Southside upper lounge is a really poor place to meet, especially now we have so many people. It's just too noisy. Could we get some other place to meet, eg the committee rooms in the Union or somewhere in Mech Eng? Henry will look into it.
The Greater London Linux User Group is short of a venue for their meetings. It would be nice if we could help them out, but the evil Conference Office takes over College at weekends, and would demand money, especially if we are inviting in large numbers of people from outside IC. The Union might not be too happy either.
Zeshan says we have 30 pounds from last year, but no ongoing funding. Publicity is already funded by the Union, so maybe we should buy CDs to burn, TDK blank CD-Rs are a pound each.