tlug: June Meeting

[craig@example.com]

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tlug note from craig@example.com
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Tokyo Linux Users Group Meeting 
Saturday Jun 14

The June 14th meeting was another success.  
It started off at Tokyo station where we dined on Okonomiyaki.  Most
peopled went for the mixed-yaki, including myself.  I went for the
gusto and ordered the oomori portion. 

John Little
brought a camera and took a few pictures.  We were all amazed at
Joe Marchak's 20" color monitor on a Linux machine running Red Hat
with Motif.  Thank you Joe and HSBC for hosting the meeting.  
Alberto Tomita removed Applixware student version on Joe's machine
and installed Applixware Developer's version for the demonstration.
This was a present surprise.  Applixware developer is a full-blown
graphical object oriented development environment.  Alberto was
able to learn the basics of program creation and put together a 
program with buttons, labels, and an input box in about 15 minutes
from the time he first touched the machine.  Tim Meegs and Leo 
commented that the GUI development IDE was pretty interesting and
Tim mentioned that it had a more graphical integration than
MS Visual C++.  There was a small sample application that 
read in a real-time Reuters feed.  The class library looked good.
We were able to open an MS Excel file and save it as HTML.   Joe
commented that the HTML code produced by Applixware was much
more readable than the code produced by Office '97.

We then tried to install Caldera Open Linux on John Little's
Compaq server with a 6 disk IDE disk array.  Unfortunately, 
the installation bogged down.  However, we did learn that 
Caldera Open Linux is in Red Hat Package Manager format and
Alberto commented that it was almost the same as the Red Hat
distribution.  CDs were passed out and a few members mentioned
that they would try to do an install and tell everyone how it
went.  

Other bits of discussion:

TLUG Meeting Schedule
---------------------
The idea came up to have weekend meetings with hardware once every 
two months.  Some people mentioned the 2nd Thursday every second
month at night and the third Saturday every second month.
Thus, the schedule could be something like this:

	(******* Just an Idea **********)
   Thursday July 11: 7:30 p.m. (?) just for dinner and discussion
          (I've had fun at the Farm Grill in Ginza.  Shakey's in
            Shinjuku is also good.  Anyplace is fine)  One advantage
	of Shakeys is that we probably wouldn't need reservations.
	An advantage of a place like the Farm Grill or that Mexican
	restaurant in Hiroo is that the food tastes better

   Saturday August 16: 12:30 p.m. lunch at Tokyo station and then
	go over to Joe Marchak's place.


   Thursday September 11: 7:30 p.m. (?) Dinner and conversation

   Saturday October 18: 12:30 p.m. Tokyo station



TLUG Server
-----------
John Little is still interested in donating a permanent server
for TLUG use if we can find a home for it with net connection.
One possibility that was brought up was to use telehoudai to
bring the server up from 11:01 p.m. until 6:59 a.m. every night
with cron.  John's house has a P75 router that can do 128Kbps
with MPP channel bonding.  The discussion didn't get too
far on this.  However, it might be good to use as a drop site
for file sharing.  Stephen Turnbull archives some stuff at
Tsukuba, but the academic network is pretty crowded most
of the time.  Also, we could put together a set of patches
and maybe work on a .deb and .rpm set of files to share
with others.  The other thing that it might be good for is
to run an IRC server to have virtual meetings.  I've had
a few meetings at Seal.Org with JWT on his Mitaka Area Net.


Tech Tid-Bits
-------------
Joe Marchak commented that there were IRQ conflicts between the
mouse and 3Com 3c503 (?) ethernet cards which caused the network
to be unstable.  I forgot the exact model number, but these were
the ISA cards without jumpers.  Evidently, you have to get the DOS
disk and set the IRQs under DOS.  I mentioned to John Little that
it would probably work under Dosemu.

I was pretty happy that I bought a Bus Logic Ultra-Wide SCSI controller
from Alberto.  Joe was mentioning some problems with certain
Adaptec controllers.  Everyone seemed to agree that disk access
speeds were a limiting factor on many Linux boxes.

I gave away some of my secrets on how to move from an
agricultural society to off-world rocket migration in LinCity.

Quite a few people
left with free Open Linux T-Shirts and Open Linux CDs. 


Other Stuff
-----------
On the way home I bought a copy of Unix User.  Here are some
highlights.

Special on GNU Hurdへの誘い
On July 7 Omron starts selling Wnn6 for Linux/FreeBSD.  (9.800 yen)
   I think that the free Wnn is version 4 or something like that.
   Orders can be placed from June 17.  
   http://nishiki.omronsoft.co.jp/SP/new.html#linux
New Book called MkLinux お気楽・極楽インストール is out for 1,854
   This is written by a Japanese author, not a translation.
CDROM is pretty awesome.  gnu Hurd 0.0, Debian-JP (both rex-jp and
   bo-jp), NetBSD mini-install, lots of other stuff.  For me,
   just the inclusion of Debian-JP rex-jp and bo-jp was worth the
   1,300 yen price.  Hurd stuff and 3D modelling stuff might be
   fun, time permitting. 










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