Minutes-3-4-00

MEETING MINUTES: - Mar 4th

The meeting was attended by members; Craig Carignan, Richard Foerster, Ken Howells, Tad Peters, Alan Shoemaker, and Eugene Clement, member founder of CVLUG and representative of MandrakeSoft.   Ken Howells brought Ursula as his guest.
Members Jeff Bartley and Isaac Saldana had planned to attend but were not present.   We have learned after the fact that they may have had a hard time finding the meeting place.
Eugene has been very busy with his new Job as Product Marketing Manager for MandrakeSoft, http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/ , and is frequently out of the area. As a stroke of good luck, he was able to attend this meeting and share some exciting news about developments at MandrakeSoft.   Mandrake has recently opened an office in Altadena and is currently building a marketing and support team that is making significant progress in the Linux world.   Members asked Eugene to explain some of the significant differences between Red Hat and Mandrake 7.0. Eugene pointed out that, in addition to special installation and configuration tools, there are four significant differences: 1) kernel is compiled using Pentium class optimization which results in better performance with P-166 up systems, 2) KDE desktop, 3) Point and Click Security level changes, 4) Supermount media mounting. Mandrake actually has 9 pre-configured graphic environments including KDE and Gnome.
Eugene also indicated improvements like DiskDrake {partitioning tool}, Drake-X {installation tool} and many other software features are rapidly increasing the popularity of this distribution. Of course, Eugene had goodies, which he provided to members, and provided a few extra copies for those who were un able to attend.   Alan Shoemaker has considerable experience with Mandrake, and we will try to coax him to write up a *review* of his personal discoveries that we can share with other members at our web site.
This was intended to be an informal meeting, but we spent a few minutes discussing organization and the formal structure of LUGIE.   After exploring everyone's personal feelings on these issues the group reached a consensus on the following basic points.

	Having a formalized structure is helpful in defining what LUGIE is all about. It also provides a level playing field where members and prospective members know the rules and expectations.
	It increases the credibility of the group. Over time LUGIE expects to adopt some group projects, establish study groups, and perhaps provide economically priced support software and tools. We may seek "donations" of equipment, software and funds specifically for these efforts. Not-for-profit status, and formal organization will greatly facilitate our success in these areas.
	Unless members are willing to fund events and activities up front {and personally}, LUGIE needs to be able to manage funds. Members have been aware that dues are currently $20.00 per year, but up to this point have never been assessed. This is partly, because we have had no specific use for membership reciepts.
	Members willingly pay dues to belong to a group that provides true value to its members. In a way, it gives a member a vested interest in the group. Those who make decisions which affect the course and direction of LUGIE need to have an investment, sharing the risks and rewards of the groups success.

Having conducted a number of Install-Fests, we have noted the actions of *fair weather* friends, looking for freebies, but who don't give anything back.   The GNU/Linux industry, in general, needs to make the distinction that "Open Source" does not mean "free".   On the whole, members are willing to consider making membership dues *optional*. However is is expected that if the group has value to its members, and having a voice on decisions involving LUGIE, membership dues will not be an issue.    It was decided that all current members are considered to be paid up members through June 2000. Unless otherwise decided, membership dues will be payable, beginning in July.

There was also some discussion of recruitment of new members. Considering the interest and attendance at this meeting, most members are aware that we could rapidly increase in size, and attract new members, but that is not our objective.   From now to June the focus will be on organization and the establishment of regular meetings and meeting format.

Members also discussed personal interests and current projects.   Among themes discussed a number centered on security issues.

Craig pointed out a recent report {see: http://www.pcweek.com/a/pcwt0002251/2447608/ }
that DDoS attacks {see: DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attacks} involved Solaris and Linux based servers, but that a Win version of trinoo has recently been discovered at Universities including James Madison University. A full report of the incident is on-line at: www.jmu.edu/info-security/engineering/issues/wintrino.htm.   Tad presented a number of conceptual configuration scenarios for firewalls and set-up for DSL connections. This is a top that several members are very interested in and will be revisited in a future meeting.

Ken provided a very brief update on his weather station project. We want to schedule a portion of a meeting for Ken to make a presentation on this project. Also, Alan, has agreed to work on a protocol document to help us get greater value from the LUGIE list. It was decided that since the LUGIE List has participants who have no interest or intention in attending LUGIE meetings, we will discuss organizational aspects and issues OFF LIST, initially.   We can start a new on-line community with *restricted* membership that can be used for the LUGIE group discussion.

The meeting broke up at 1:00 pm with some members going to lunch at a nearby cafe.