MEETING MINUTES: - 
October 13th 

Members attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan
Shoemaker,  Don Evinger,  Jim Vassilakos, Forrest Sherman,  Joe Bruner, and Eric Holland. 

New members, Ossil Macavinta, Dana Rodden Dick Mathews, Mark DiNicolai and Karl Pomroy  were unable to make the meeting.    Also missing at this meeting were Dave Reisz, Gary Taylor, Ken Howels, Jim Lucha, Klaus Herzog Hung Nguyen, Kandy Phan, Tad Peters, Isaac Saldana , Mac Shaver and Craig Carignan. 

Members briefly discussed an announcement concerning the Linux Public Broadcasting  Network, LPBN proposed by the host of the Linux Labs Users Group in Van Nuys.    People interested in this streaming media project plan to attend weekly workshops at the Tom Bradley Youth and Family Center in Los Angeles.  The first such workshop was held Sept. 17, 2001 from 6:30pm to 8:30pm.

Members also spent some time discussing desktop strategies that might facilitate introduction of Linux in organizations and groups where some Windows capabilities are required.  Some options include: Lin4Win, which is packaged with Mandrake, VMWare, Win4Lin, Wine, and a debut product: LindowsOS, which is a distribution that has the ability to run Linux and Windows applications without requiring additional software.   {note: LindowsOS information was actually provided by Don Evinger after the meeting}.  

 NeTraverse Win4Lin 3.0 enables Linux users to run popular Windows programs at native speeds without additional hardware or the need to dual boot, dramatically improving productivity and reducing hardware and OS license upgrade cost.  However it requires a valid copy of Windows-95/98 which is installed for system wide use.   

  Wine is an implementation of the Windows 3.x and Win32 APIs on top of X and Unix. Think of Wine as a Windows compatibility layer.   Wine does not require Microsoft Windows, as it is a completely alternative implementation consisting of 100% Microsoft-free code, but it can optionally use native system DLLs if they are available.  

VMware Workstation 3.0 increases the productivity of technical professionals by enabling multiple operating systems to run on a physical computer in secure, transportable, and high-performance virtual computers, but it is fairly expensive at about $300.00.

Forrest gave us an update on his Web Authoring/Content Management packages.  He indicated that in continuing to work with CMF Zope, he has become less enthusiastic and has begun to look into other options.   A lot of the information he has gotten was from the cmf.zope.org site is the central information point for developers of the CMF and developers for the CMF.   The site uses recent versions of the CMF, so it is called the CMF Dogbowl; the term derives from the Mozilla project, where developers can "eat their own dogfood".    A new discovery of note which Forrest may be able to tell us more about next month is a project by Gentoo Linux using guide XML.   The Gentoo Linux team uses a special simple XML format called ‘guide XML’ for all of its documentation and web pages. If you're interested in learning more about this format, you may want to read the A site reborn series of IBM developerWorks articles, written by Daniel Robbins.

The meeting was a great success, and we are all looking forward to our next session on November 10 , 2001