tlug: What's happening at other LUGS? ... This is VanLUG:

[Joe Marchak <joem@example.com>]

I thought people might be interested in what other LUG's are doing. 
There's a lot going on outside of Tokyo :-)  Here's a summary from the
Vancouver LUG, by Julian Savage.  If anyone else has contacts at other
LUG's, see if they'll write a summary for us. 

-Joe.

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Hello,

I thought I'd tell you about this month's VanLUG meeting, just because I
found it quite exciting in some ways. Attendance seemed high: I think that
someone else might post actual figures, but I think that there might have
been around 100 people or so. I think that this is from a combination of
the publicity we received in the local press when we ran the Installfest,
and the fact that the main speaker was an Oracle representative. He gave a
speech which went into how Oracle works in depth. He discussed Oracle's
benefits over other database systems, the features new to Oracle 8, and
why Oracle was bringing out a version for Linux. The reason he gave was
that it is for corporate customers who have expressed an interest in a
version for that platform, and the licensing costs he cited reflected
that: he quoted $2000 for a five user license. On the other hand he
indicated that costs for developers would be minimal. The presenter
brought a few copies of the Oracle 8.0.5 for Linux release, and someone
will be making copies for anybody in VanLUG who is interested. I think it
is also available for download on Oracle's web site. You might be
interested to know that someone video taped this presentation (missing the
first part due to coming late). 

The other thing that I think was interesting is there is a lot of interest
in courses on various things to do with Linux, such as TCP/IP, Perl, and
IP Masq. I was interested in this because it could be fun to teach a
course on Perl or something, and because there are other areas where I'd
like a chance to learn for no or little cost. Has the Tokyo LUG done
anything like this?

In a previous message you said that it looked like the VanLUG had a lot of
momentum. At this point there definitely is. We've got some good people at
the head of things, and a lot of people seem willing to help out. The
installfest was chaos, but it seemed to work out fairly well, and despite
one comment to the contrary I think that VanLUG was well represented at
McPherson centre. VanLUG will have a table at Comdex which will be another
chance to get some publicity. I'm a bit of two minds on this myself. I'm
wondering how Linux will change under this sudden surge in popularity.

Julian.


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Joe Marchak joem@example.com ph:03-5203-3925 fx:03-5203-3699 ldist: s/03/813/
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