[...] Not much kit or repairing of kit (perhaps MJR would care to explain the problem with the aged machine?
Was it aged? It spends most of its time strapped to a workbench, so it was in an unusual (lack of) case.
Anyway, it was kernel panicking instead of powering down neatly. Nearby guru Jonathan McDowell stroked his laptop then splattered apm=realmode-power-off into the lilo.conf to make it work. I'd not heard of that option. There was some cursing of Mandrake's graphical boot because no-one knew how to enter kernel options for testing.
There was an IBM machine with a "hardware" modem. Well, it was a modem and there was some hardware, but it seemed to be a winmodem of some sort... anyone got the full details? We also couldn't do much because it didn't like the aged monitor, wasn't running getty and didn't stop at the lilo prompt at all.
It was an afternoon event starting at 2pm, and finishing with some people going to the bar, so it may have gone on all night but I went home.
I think Sionide, Mike and another were there after Dave Cooper and I left, but ALUG talk had given way to recording quality and pay.