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.
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).
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'.
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.
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.
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...
Syd
Hi, MJ.
First up, I agree we're on the same side - that's why I posted here originally, so please don't take new input as an attempt to diminish ALUG. As I've said since I first brought up the subject of an Ipswich LUG, if we can reach an agreement on an infrastructure, I see no problem with flying the ALUG flag in Ipswich. If I truly had no interest in collaborating with ALUG, I wouldn't have posted here in the first place - unlike all the other major towns in East Anglia, who are happily running their own independent LUGs.
Yes, I feel it comes across as an attempt to splinter the ALUG.
Why not use the flexible wiki at http://www.alug.org.uk/contrib/ ?
One simple reason. I had no idea it existed. There are seemingly only four entries, which don't look as if they've been contributed by your common-or-garden user. There's also no mention of it on the submissions page [http://www.alug.org.uk/background/submissions.html], which expresses the preferences that page changes should be discussed with the page author and that any new pages would be better discussed on the list ... I don't think it's unfair to say that the current site "appears" to be static - it's filled with references to 3 year old events - and isn't atm very "inviting" for new content.
However, looking at it constructively, there are a number of features which I can't seem to find. To take one example at random, one of the ideas discussed last night was a support questions page, where a user can ask a question and get answers recorded by other members. We discussed a few questions, including one which we really need to see screenshots of, in order to resolve. Is there a way I can easily upload an image over HTTP on this contrib page? That feature might also be handy to use Photos to record meets.
It's only 'not open' because there's been some low-maintenance efforts to block spammers. If you want to replace the WikiEngine, change the anti-spam and revamp the content, I'm sure many people would welcome that. The webmasters could either give you ssh, ftp or a redirect. I tried to replace it in the past, but lack of familiarity with modern wikis and a worker going silent mid-change meant it never happened.
If ALUG moves towards the same open model at any point in the future,
Huh? How is ALUG not open? Have the cabal suddenly moved in and locked it down in the few months since I left? I doubt it.
All you have to do is pick a job and start doing it yourselves. You don't have to "pile on pressure and deadlines" to anyone.
I started the thread on this mailing list, asking what ALUG could offer, and what was available. After a couple of fruitful mails, on and off-list, I'm afraid I haven't heard anything back from David, as I understood it one half of the two webmasters, when I asked some specific questions about the possibilities of something like a MediaWiki installation ... that included an offer for assistance to help with building such a site, and also questions about how we might be able to access the servers remotely from Suffolk, incl. questions about access as root ...
I suggest starting by either editing the pages with the "Edit Page" links or getting website access of a type you like from either:
<SNIP>
control the web hosting and domains IIRC. I'm sure one of those will have time to open the door to you.
My offer to assist with the ALUG website still stands, if ALUG as a whole wishes to move in this direction. At the end of the day, I didn't get any firm interest from anyone with the root passwords in my last thread that this was something that you intended to do in the very immediate future. I don't feel it's my place to demand access to a server in someone else's control when I'm the new kid on the block, which is how we reach the alternative of running a separate site. If you can organise a discussion with the relevant ALUG server admins to address the kind of features we're talking about here (IMHO, atm essentially a more flexible MediaWiki instance) sometime soon, I'd be happy to participate. In fact, I'll even make a rare trip to Norwich, if someone can organise a discussion of the topic.
I think iPlug seems to have a bad case of 'Not Invented Here' and is unwilling to cooperate with its neighbours. I feel it's particularly stupid to split an existing web site when lugmasters have been looking at merging/co-hosting dynamic sites, to ease maintenance: there just aren't enough webmaster-hours to go round. If iPlug has spare webmaster-hours, please share them!
The offer is there. I've yet to start building another site ... if we can come to an agreement on the functionality of the site, I will gladly assist in revamping the ALUG site in that direction.
Please take me up on it - on or off list. However, I feel a certain responsibility to offer this kind of functionality - one way or another - before our next Ipswich meet, because I think it's essential to the growth and stability of the local group.
I hope this comes across as constructive - I, in no way, intended to tread on anyone's toes when I started this discussion.
Cheers,
Peter.
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,
-
Brett Parker -
samwise -
Syd Hancock