9th August2003

When: 10:30 – 16:00, Saturday 9th August 2003

Where: Seminar Room 1, Building 59 (Zepler), Department of Electronics & Computer Science, Southampton University.

Who was there:

• AdrianBridgett

• BrianChivers

• HugoMills

• JohnLewis

• StephenWhitenstall

• TonyWhitmore

• NickChalk

• LisiReisz

• AlanPope

• MatGrove

• AndyWatts

• ThomasAdam

• PhilipStubbs

• JulianWald

• TomBragg

• StephenDavies

What happened:

• Brian Chivers brought along his poorly mail server, and HugoMills spent some time trying to get the box to stay up for long enough to extract the all important files from the Hard Disk. Sadly, the box crashed whenever Brian tried to copy a file bigger than 1MB so it was a futile attempt, but at least he knows the reset button works well! For the record, it seemed to be a hardware problem rather than a software one! Brian also did his usual impersonation of Father Xmas with a distribution of computer goodies.

• JohnLewis was boring all & sundry with the digital photos of his new study, complete with wall mounted rack cabinet! He was also showing people his genealogy research, using a package called GeneWeb. Had long conversation with Matt and shorter one with Alan on how to get a win prog (RFViewer, used for viewing Family History Data CDs) running under wine, even Thomas joined in. Conclusion was that it might be possible to write a wrapper program that wil allow the CDs to be accessed under Linux.

• StephenWhitenstall and TonyWhitmore had a long conversation about OSS in Education, including SchoolForge and Chaos Communications Camp.

• AlanPope upgraded from Debian stable to Debian unstable, and managed to get KDE3.1 installed and running. ThomasAdam and HugoMills introduced him to the delights of configuring your own custom kernel before building it, and he built a brand spanking new 2.6.0-test3 kernel. One thing that was learned was the difference to the compile procedure under 2.6 – ‘make’ rather than ‘make dep && make modules && make bzImage’. Also, HugoMills was pressing AlanPope to compile using the ‘make-kpkg’ option on debian, but with little success.

• Whoo! Hoo! We’ll be expecting reports on how it looks. Incidentally I forgot to mention I upgraded my laptop from testing to sid, guess that was cos it happened so quick. It isn’t every day I get to download 150Mb in 3.56 minutes. It took a lot longer to replace the 200 plus packages once downloaded.
• And if you stayed away ‘cos you thought an AGM was bound to be boring then you were right! Actually the AGM business took place sometime in the afternoon, lasted all of two minutes and resulted in no change in the committee.

• ThomasAdam helped Philip to get the frame buffer device working on his laptop. Philip is now kicking himself because he has now remembered all those things he wanted to download, but could not think of when connected to that super network.