[Charlug] Saturday Meeting Summary: 02-Dec-2006

[Don Parris]

We held our first Saturday meeting today at CPCC.  Joe and I were the only
two to show up from the LUG.  Everyone else was from CPCC, or had travelled
some distance to visit with us today.  On the bright side, we did have a
Linux newbie visit, and I believe registered with the LUG.  We lots of
coffee, bagels and donuts and only a few people to consume it all.  I had
hoped that we would see at least one or two more of our regulars today, as
well as someone from UNCCLUG.  I have attirbuted the low attendance to the
changeover of the e-mail lists, and hope to see more people in January. :-)
That said, we did have about 10 people present.  I have also been reaching
out to local colleges to inform them about our meetings, in the hopes that
they will encourage their students to attend.

I brought the membership cards that our by-laws call for, and Joe registered
those who were present.  I provided copies of the by-laws and discussed 2
amendments I would like to make to the by-laws.  I will post the proposed
changes on the website for everyone to review.  I had hoped to discuss the
possibility of holding an election in January, but that might be too soon.
The logic behind a January election was that we could follow the calendar
year.  I would like to get opinions on this.  We also need to consider how
to conduct an election over the course of two meetings.  That shouldn't be
too difficult, but we should address it.  The only real complaint was about
parking, and Joe should be addressing that in the near future.

The presentation covered a Windows-to-Linux migration involving 455 desktops
in 9 cities - all led by a Linux advocate with no proven track record in
IT.  He successfully deployed Fedora Core 5 & K12LTSP, and had to endure a
physical altercation involving an irate Windows admin at one location.
Strong management backing and a heavy investment in web-based technology
made the migration possible.  Several people lost their jobs for refusing to
cooperate with the migration.  The migration came about because a Windows
admin had used only a few legitimate copies of Windows to operate the
company's PCs.

The CPCC staff and students contributed greatly to our presentation on a
Windows-to-Linux migration, as did some of the other participants.  One of
the CPCC students has used SQL Lite in a gaming project, and we hope to
convince him to present that in the early part of next year.  I tried to get
Maria Winslow (a N. Carolina author) to come and speak for us at some point,
but she has 'retired' from the FOSS world.  She wrote a book about FOSS for
business managers.  Don't forget that Novell is presenting Groupwise on the
12th of this month.  Speaking of presentations, what would everyone want to
learn about in January?  I am trying to line up Red Hat for January, but
we'll see.

Kevin, who faces accessibility issues, shared his perspective regarding
OpenOffice.org.  He essentially uses VIM to write the text, and then drops
that into OpenOffice.org for post-production formatting, etc.  He blames
much of the problem involving accessibility on lack of proper training in
combination with Microsoft's stranglehold on the marketplace.

And that's about it.  Joe can fill in the blanks, especially the number of
people actually registered today. ;-)

Regards,
Don
-- =

D.C. Parris
Editor, Free Software Advocate
http://www.linkedin.com/in/dcparris
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://charlug.org/pipermail/charlug/attachments/20061202/85ef7f42/att=
achment.htm