Minutes 1998-12-15

The meeting was announced last minute, but we actually had 4 people show up. It was held at the Pizza Hut on the Vestal Parkway. It commenced at 7 pm. It concluded around 10 pm.

We've learned a little bit from past meetings and actually conducted the business details before ordering dinner. We even had an ad hoc agenda!

=Attendees=
 * Joel "Just Wanted To Get Out Of The House" Tleon
 * Rich Weber
 * Mike L.
 * Jeremy Impson

=Discussion= The meeting went (roughly) as follows.

The group's name
We narrowed it down to these four candidates:


 * STONY LUG		Southern Tier Of NY Linux User Group
 * NYSLE		NY State Linux Enthusiasts
 * STNYLUG		Southern Tier of NY Linux User Group
 * ST LUUNY		Southern Tier Linux Users of Upstate NY

Next meeting will be the final vote.

Next Meeting
The next meeting will be held at Tuesday January 5th, 1998 at 7pm. Suggestions for the meeting place are welcome!

Future Meeting Places
We really need to hold some meetings in places where slightly more structured meetings can be conducted. Reasons for this include the ability to do paperwork more easily, less distractions, and first and foremost, more computers!

Meeting place ideas included:
 * Someone's house		(We're harmless, really!)
 * Broome CC/SUNY B.	(This is most promising, but first we need an on-campus contact i.e. student member)
 * Cytronix		(This is a company providing commercial Linux support--again, we'd need a contact first.)
 * Barnes & Nobles		(See next section for more information)

Future Activities
Being that this was his first meeting, Mike L. asked what we want to achieve with this group. We all agreed on these three items:


 * Provide support and advice to each other
 * "Proselytize"--spread the word about Linux and Open Source
 * Have fun talking about computers and whatever else...

The biweekly Pizza Hut meetings certainly achieve number 3, and to some degree number 1. But the environment isn't ideal for number 1, and doesn't do anything towards number 2.

Suggestions for future activities:
 * Install fest	(at someones home (with good power :) or at a meeting hall.)
 * Lectures
 * Teleconferencing and communications (what apps are available, what issues are involved?)
 * Distributions (advantages and disadvantages)
 * Security
 * Tutorials
 * Perl
 * Samba
 * "What is Linux/Open Source?" (Public outreach at Barnes & Nobles. They provide community-oriented groups a venue, they provide advertings, and since hey have a large computer books section, they'd be benefitting their customers.)
 * Teleconferencing and communications (what apps are available, what issues are involved?)
 * Distributions (advantages and disadvantages)
 * Security

Food and Fun
We spent the rest of the time eating pizza and talking about the computer history, putting a bit of things in context (at least for me:)

Miscellany
It was mentioned that the followin BBS is a good resource for technical problems:

telnet bbs.isca.uiowa.edu

Someone wanted to know of a good tool for fooling around on the network. Many exist, but one really good, really general tool is netcat:

http://199.103.168.8:3430/web1/hak/netcat.html