Minutes 1999-01-05

A meeting was held on January 5, 1999 at 7:30 at the Pizza Hut in Endicott, NY.

=Attendees=
 * Jeremy Impson
 * Jerry Guy
 * Kent "Mongo" Taylor
 * Michael Lurie

=Discussion= Much talk ensued, important business was conducted, and good pizza was consumed. The highlights...

Name
We voted on a name for the group. The winning name was "STNY LUG", with three votes. Runner up was "STONY LUG", with one vote.

And there was much rejoicing...

Next Meeting
The next meeting will be at 7:00 pm on Tuesday, January 19th, 1999, at, uh, well, at the Endicott Pizza Hut. Why? Because I said so. See the next item for a really swell reason to go to the meeting.

Invited Talk
Serious thought about "Invited Talk" topics was made. It was decided that some sucker would give the very first talk at the next meeting. That sucker turned out to be Jeremy Impson, and the subject of the talk will be "Perl on the command line: you're one-way ticket to Nirvana".

Yes, Perl isn't strictly Linux related, but it was the only thing I felt I could do on short notice. Keep in mind that since this will happen in a restaurant, it may not go so well. We'll see.

We decided we need to find a place more conducive to slightly organized meetings. Cafe Au Lait and Java Joe's were suggested.

Other talk topics discussed were:
 * configuring sound cards
 * configuring and using various tape drives
 * pricing a building a Linux system (what is needed, what vendors do we trust, and what is a good price for components?)

Miscellaneous
Miscellaneous things discusses throughout the evening (these should probably be mentioned in a FAQ on our web pages)


 * The book Guide to Upgrading and Repairing PCs was recommended as a good reference for building PCs.


 * The web sites www.killerapp.com, www.ebay.com, www.pricewatch.com, and www.tomshardware.com were suggested as good resources for building systems.


 * The Linux Documentation Project (LDP) is a project to, uh, document Linux. It is located at http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP

It has a number of guides, for system administration, network setup, and even kernel internals. However, the most valuable items there is the collection of HOWTOs, which are little instruction guides for just about everything. See also http://www.linux-howto.com for more documentation.

There is a distribution of Linux that fits on one floppy disk (two if you want X11). It is called muLinux, and is available at http://www4.pisoft.it/~andreoli/mulinux.html It is incredibly useful, as it comes with just about every utility a user would need. It is not great at being a rescue disk. See tomsrtbt http://www.toms.net/rb for that. muLinux has editors, pppd, web browser, web server, printing, soundcard support, and bunches of other stuff. It would be ideal for quick and easy diskless clients. Just pop them in the floppy drive of a cluster of PCs (say, that all run WinNT normally), NFS mount some more disk space, and bang! Instant Linux cluster.

Finally Mongo recommended some books by Gerald Weinberg. Among his works are Psychology of Computer Programming and Consulting: A Guide to Getting and Giving Advice. Oh yeah, Michael mentioned the classic Mythical Man-Month by Fred Brooks.

=External Links=
 * Source
 * www.killerapp.com
 * www.ebay.com
 * www.pricewatch.com
 * www.tomshardware.com
 * http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP
 * http://www.linux-howto.com
 * http://www4.pisoft.it/~andreoli/mulinux.html
 * http://www.toms.net/rb