Re: tlug: Re: December 13th

[Craig Oda <craig@example.com>]

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On Sun, 14 Dec 1997, John Little wrote:

>   A short description and a few pictures of the Saturday meeting are
>   now to be found at:-
> 
> 		http://www2.gol.com/gaijin#TLUG

Awesome pictures!  The meeting was great.  

I didn't even realize that you guys got NIS up on
Sparky.

Sorry I had to leave early to attend a company function
and was unable to help with the cleanup.   

There were about 27 people at the meeting, including three women,
and 8 Japanese people.  Also of interest were Karl-Max from
Germany (who lives in Germany) and Nick from Ukraine (who
I think may live in Japan now).  

Dmytro Kovalev and his son Yuri won for smallest Linux machine.
They had it running on an IBM palmtop, complete with X windows.

David Riley had to take a plane to get to the meeting.  He's
one of the guys in a pony-tail sitting next to me in the
Chinese restaurant picture.  

Jim Tittsler showed me yet another UNIX command-line trick
that I didn't know (make zImage &&make modules &&make modules_include).
Joe and I were still using make zImage ; make modules ; \
make modules_include. 

Frank O' Carrol has 64 processors hooked up with gigabyte
hardware and BSD.  Maybe one day, it will churn Linux.  :-)
Frank agreed to give a talk on high-performance super-computing
in the future.  If I remember correctly, he mentioned that
he saw a 124 (around) processor Linux pyramid at a 
conference and heard of projects to build ones close
to 1,000 processors.   

Gaspar Sinai probably had the second fastest box with his
600mhz Alpha machine.  Unfortunately, I had to leave
before his demonstration of Yudit unicode editor.

Two of the new members, Ayako Kato and Yohko Kase, are
working at a company that sells fully configured Linux
servers for intranet/Internet use and supports them. 
Amazing.  I spent about 30 minutes reading their web
page at http://www.10art-ni.co.jp and found out that their
company is very Java and very Linux oriented.  From
their company's web page:

   Linuxサーバーの優位点  
   ・技術的にOpenであるため、多くのサポートが期待できる。
   ・ベンダーに依存しない＝ユーザー主導型で自 由なコンピューティング
    環境が実現できる。
   ・低コストである。(Webサーバー、ファイル・プリントシェア、
    Firewall、プロキシ等までFree)
   ・多くのハードウェアに対応しているl 

I had heard of several U.S. and European companies getting into
commercial support of Linux and found it great that Japanese
companies were out there openly promoting Linux for commercial
use.   Perhaps we can ask them to speak or get one of their
co-workers to speak on the commercial situation of Linux in the
Japanese market.


The meeting was a great success and in order to keep up with the
growing interest in Linux, we should probably devise a strategy
to minimize the workload on Joe Marchak for setup and cleanup.
And/or have the meeting rotate between places.  We had a good
turnout for the setup crew, but we may need to organize
things so that people show up, set up, and then scramble to
lunch.  We had two hubs and two physically seperated networks
of Intel and Sparc architectures.  I'll bring this topic
up again in the future.  

My other thought was to set up a real agenda at the meeting
and have a real lecture-style presentation for at least
30 minutes of the meeting.   I was also thinking
that during the hands-on section, we should designate an
area as a novice area where an experienced Linux member
explains things like UNIX/Linux system/network administration, 
TCP/IP routing, or maybe even basics of Apache performance
tuning, SQL database, or maybe even intermediate emacs usage.

Or, maybe have parallel sessions of novice and intermediate.
If we get over 30 people at the next meeting, there is 
going to be a wide range of Linux knowledge and probably
a wealth of information exchange possible.

Personally, in addition to hearing more about parallel
processing from Frank, Linux in the Japanese commercial
market from Ayako and Yohko's company, I would love to
hear from Kenichi Nakamura about what Cygnus in Japan
is doing (or maybe getting a talk from the pres of Cygnus
Japan?), John Little might be coaxed into giving a talk
on what its like to manage a large TCP/IP Unix 
high availability network in Japan, or maybe a talk from
Joe's boss...     

Anyway, a big thanks to Joe Marchak and John Little for
making it all happen. 


Regards,
Craig


P.S.  Good luck to Alberto Tomita on finishing his dissertation
by Dec. 24.
   

Other notes:

In response to the question about PGP 2.6.2 vs PGP 5.0 
for Linux, it appears that the older PGP 2.6.2 uses
RSA encryption and the default for PGP 5.0 is DSS/Diffie-Hellman.
They don't appear to be compatible unless you set the
PGP 5.0 program to use the RSA encryption.  However, the
world appears to be moving to DSS/Diffie-Hellman, at least
the PGP world.  

Jim Tittsler reported some problems with compatibility
after his upgrade to RedHat 5.0 glibc6.


Say, on a non-related issue, what do I need to get the
Japanese fonts to appear in GNU emacs 20.2?  They work fine
in XEmacs, but it appears that the new GNU emacs is
using some new scheme for displaying double-byte code.
 

- ------
craig@example.com    
PGP Public Key   http://www.twics.com/~craig/personal/pgp/


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---------------------------------------------------------------
TLUG Meeting Dec. 13, 12:30 at Tokyo station Yaesu Chuo ticket gate
13:30 Starbuck's coffee.  13:45 HSBC | info: joem@example.com
At least 3 functional Sparc IPC machines will be raffled out
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