peter's blog

Today we had a great meeting of the CharLUG with a lot of interesting discussions It seems that over the last meetings some topics always came up.

First of all virtualization. This seems to be the hot topic for everybody. Folks like to test and play around with OS's in a VM and it opens up opportunities to try things that otherwise were really hard to do. I didn't take a real poll but it seems that most people favor VirtualBox on the desktop, but VMware is still very popular.

The time and day for the Snack & Hack changed. The new time is the first Thursday of the month at 6:30. Please check our meeting page for updates.

Our last meeting was a huge success. We had a lot of people showing up and good talks about Linux and Open Source. Lets keep the spirit and lets get together on April 7, 2012 for the next meeting!

On another note, we had a visit from a team of the South East Linux Fest. Here is some more detail about it:

SouthEast | LinuxFest
Linux in the GNU/South

At our last meeting we decided to establish a regular meeting schedule. For the time being we want to meet every four weeks starting Saturday, March 10th at 1:00pm.

When: Saturday, March 10, 2012, 1:00 PM
Where: Bellacino's Pizza & Grinders
7800 Stevens Mill Rd # Q
Matthews, NC
Repeat: Every 4 weeks

And here is some more detail:

We all are into Linux. We hang out. Chaos ensues.

It's getting closer. On Saturday, 10:00am our installfest will start at the Hackspace. Everybody is welcome to bring their machine and we will be happy to help and guide you through the installation and setup of Linux.

But the installfest has now an additional focus.

The CharLUG is currently preparing for an installfest.

What is an installfest?
Wikipedia has a nice definition:
An Installfest (a portmanteau of installation and festival) is an event, generally sponsored by a local Linux User Group, university or LAN party, at which people get together to do mass installations of computer operating systems or software, most often Linux and other open source software.

When: December 7, 2010 6:00pm
Where: Panera Bread - South Park
Meetup link: here

Seeing the success of the University City mini meets I decided to schedule one for South Charlotte.

To accommodate most people I am putting it at 6-10pm. I will be there for the whole duration but I expect people to come and go at various times. Same style as the University City mini meet, no formal topics, just tech talk and coffee.

If you are using Pidgin and MSN then most likely you saw a lot of "omega.contacts.msn.com" errors today. Luckily there is an easy fix for this issue.

1. Get the latest certificate for omega.contacts.msn.com. You can do this by going to https://omega.contacts.msn.com in your favorite browser and download the certificate for the site (click on the certificate icon and choose save to file). Or you can simply use the attached file.

We added a page for upcoming meetings. It can be accessed here.

We will keep this page in sync with the Meetup pages. But this might be of course not always the case. If you are missing any meetings here or on the Meetup or if you want to suggest and/or organize a meeting please contact us or post to the Meetup.

The Meetup group is now directly accessible from the main menu. Join the meetup and the mailing list to keep up to date!