[PLUG] Re: Hello from Lincoln City
David Mandel
dmandel at pdxlinux.org
Sun Dec 14 20:01:01 UTC 2003
Chris,
See my response at bottom of this posting.
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On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Chris Enos wrote:
> Hello PLUG members,
>
> My name is Chris, and I am a Linux addict/user from Lincoln City,
> Oregon. I have been using Linux for about three years, and until today I
> believed I was the only Linux user here in LC. I finally made contact
> with the other/s--they are humans too. I think?
>
> I have two (maybe three) others interested in starting a Lincoln City
> LUG. Any information you can give on howto go about this will be
> welcome. (E.g. Go for pizza, drink beer, plot MS overthrow, drink more
> beer, go home, install another distro, puke beer, and stay up all night
> to tweak config files.) Is that how it works?
>
> Anyway, we are serious about getting a LUG going here. I have never been
> to a LUG meeting anywhere and would like to know what to do. We have
> tentative plans to have our first meeting, November 17th, 2003. Between
> us, I am the only one who has ever done a Linux install of any kind, and
> for our first meeting I was going to walk the others through the process
> (baptism by fire).
>
> We have a great location to meet. It will be in the back room of a
> computer gaming place set up by one of our wanna-be members for the kids
> here in town as a way to keep them off the street. We will have access
> to many, many networked computers and high speed Internet. If I have
> time I want to do a couple of different distro installs to give them an
> idea of some of the differences between distros. With several computers
> to work with, I can do this simultaneously. I thought maybe I'd do a
> Debian install (woody) and then do an apt-get upgrade to unstable for
> them, as well as, do a Red Hat or SuSE, or Mandrake (mainstream)
> install. Gento will take too long. I also plan on throwing on a live cd
> distro or two (Knoppix, Morphix, SuSE). We'll see how the time goes.
>
> If anyone at PLUG has any suggestions, please let know. I'm really just
> winging it here.
>
> Thank you for your consideration, Chris
>
>
>
Chris,
I hope someone got back to you sooner than I am, but here is my
response.
I want to encourage you and others to start local and special
interest Open Source user groups. This is really important to
promoting Open Source software. Retailers don't make a lot of
money off of Linux and other Open Source software, so they aren't
going promote it the way they have promoted other software. Thus,
those of us who care about Open Source software have to find other
ways of promoting it and LUGs are certainly one very important way
of doing this.
There are any hard and fast rules about starting and running
LUGs, but I have found that:
(1) It is nice to have a web site. However, this will come
with time. It does not have to be one of the first things
you do.
(If you want a web site, lots of people will give you space
for free. If you can't find a good place to host it, PLUG
will give you space on our server.)
(2) A mailing list like plug at pdxLinux.org is much more important
than a web site, because it gives everyone a good way of
communicating with each other.
(PLUG is also willing to host a mailing list using mailman
on our server if you need this.)
(3) The next thing is the importance of simply meeting and you
seem to have this all lined up. It works best if you have
a program, but a small group can get by without planned
programs and probably needs to get by without planned
programs because of the amount of effort required.
However, the important thing about meetings is to have them
consistantly - same place - same time - every month, week, year
or whatever.
It can be difficult to select a time to meet. You need a
time when most people can come. Your meeting times are
also tied to your meeting locations since many sites are
only available certain days. This is especially true for
groups like PLUG that need free space. (PLUG likes to use
PSU for our monthly meetings, because PSU has been good
enough to give us excellent space and facilities including
access to an Infocus type projector for our meetings.
Of course, this means we can't have beer and food at the
meetings, but we get around this by scheduling the after meeting
meeting at the Lucky Labrador <www.luckylab.com>. PLUG
schedules other meetings elsewhere. For example, we have
our monthly clinics at Riverdale High School who provide
excellent facilities for hands-on work, and we have our
monthly advanced topics meetings at Jax's which is centrally
located and has good food and drink.)
I don't know what schedule would work well for your group, but
I would consider a weekend meeting - because this might help
you get an out of town speaker now and then. I know I would
be willing to spend a day or two at Lincoln city that included
a presentation to your group. I could bring my wife and she
could go shopping for a couple hours while I gave the talk.
(Of course, it might be a better talk if I went shopping while
she gave the talk.)
(4) You talked about doing a few demo installations during your
first meeting - say RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, etc.
I would also have a few copies of Knoppix CDs to hand out
if possible. Knoppix will run directly from CD on many
PCs and this makes it great for people who just want to try
Linux without installing it on their hard disk. (Knoppix
requires a fair bit of resources to run directly from CD.
You need an Intel based computer with at least 128mb of RAM
and it prefers 192mb+.)
(5) Once you get the LUG up and sort of going and get a web site
built, you can register the LUG at places like:
www.Linux.org
http://www.ssc.com:8080/glue
http://lugww.counter.li.org/
and then if you want you can start calling various Linux vendors
once in a while and hit them up for goodies to give out at
meetings. Of course, they have all cut back on this during the
recession, but a few of them still give things to LUGs as
advertising.
Sincerely,
David Mandel
Chief Activist
Portland Linux/Unix Group
560 SE Alexander
Corvallis, Oregon 97333
(541) 684-4644 at work
(541) 730-5285 cell
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David Mandel, Instructor http://www.PioneerPacific.edu
Other Affiliations
David Mandel http://www.DavidMandel.com
Portland Linux/Unix Group http://pdxLinux.org
LinuxFund http://LinuxFund.org
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