On Tue, Feb 20, 2007 at 03:37:21PM +0000, Syd Hancock wrote:
ALUG operates over a wide geographical area which is one reason why it functions mainly through email. Meetings and new wikis etc do not 'splinter' that but add to it.
And the list is still one of the places that anyone can ask anything and 90% of the time get a nice answer - the other place is #alug on irc.oftc.net - the alug IRC channel.
As I have said several years ago, IMHO more frequent and more local meetings would be good (and was willing to be involved with organising, as some will recall).
Yes indeed, and it was good.
Good luck to anyone who wants to organise more frequent small meetings in the area where they live. Ignore the people who will shout you down and criticise - later they will say 'no-one ever does anything'.
Luck shouldn't be required - and a lot of the people that are in Norwich that have been vocal on the list have been talking about travelling down to Ipswich for one of the meetings, so that it can be discussed and we can go from there - the amount of venom on the list just doesn't reflect the people involved. ALUG works in a very similar way to the Debian project - if you think you can do better, do it, show us all, and we'll fold it in!
There is this thing called 'freedom' you know, just go ahead and do what you want to do and call it what you want to call it.
Err, I'm fairly sure people already said that - as has always been the case in ALUG - if you think something needs to be done, and you have the resources available to do it, do it! Link to it from the wiki, post about it on the mailing list, be constructive.
Incidentally IMNSHO some of the responses from the old guard here go a long way to explain why ALUG is not expanding even though linux use in the region, as everywhere, certainly is. There is certainly room for other alternatives as well as ALUG.
So, lots of small groups are going to be an "expansion" of ALUG? Fair play, good thinking that man.
But then, some people dare to think that there should be more distros than just d*bi*n or even there should be alternatives to G**me, heh...
Work means that I work with Solaris, Debian (stable + backports), CentOS and RHEL on a regular basis. Of those, I can tell you (for a fact) that the nicest to administer and the simplest to configure (things are in the right places), is debian - the package maintainers really *do* care about thier packages, and they're generally very responsive to changes. Obfuscation doesn't help you sound like anything but a retard, btw...
Personally, I couldn't give a crap about Gnome, KDE, XFCE or any of the other thousands of "Desktop Environments" that are out there, I'm really rather happy with my minimalistic window manager (ion3) - I'm still an avid xterm user, too (I hate gnome-terminal and konsole).
It's great to have choice, and by all means, try every distribution out there till you find one that suits you, but when you start getting to the point of maintaining 20+ workstations, and another 20+ servers you'll soon find which actually makes life easier to manage.
I still consider myself an ALUG member, even though I moved to Brighton 18 months ago. I'm not going to leave the list any time soon, and if I have got the time I may make it to some meetings.
Thanks,