Members  attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan Shoemaker and Don Evinger.  

Alan provided us with a report of his involvement at the recent eLUG Vendor Fair held Saturday May 20th in Torrence.  Alan was working with Mandrake, providing demonstrations and answering questions. 

Fourteen Linux vendors participated.  Two Linux distribution manufacturers were present.   MandrakeSoft, the makers of the Mandrake distribution, had the latest beta version of their distribution running on a laptop for visitors to try out and were giving away free Mandrake 7.0 CDs.  Alan reported that he ran into Klaus Herzog, who is one of our members, at the event.  eLinux.com, the host of the event, was also scheduled to host the Linux at LAX on Saturday June 10th.  at Creative Computers in Torrence.

Our group, is in contact with Anne Sharp who coordinates their LUG programs, and we have registered LUGIE.  One of the things discussed at this meeting was the possibility of joining the Open Alliance Network program.   Like many affiliate programs LUGIE could earn a 3% referral fee on net-shipped sales.   Both Alan and Don agree that this could be good for the group but only if no pressure was placed on members to make purchases through eLinux.  This topic will be revisited at our next meeting.

Alan also provided a brief report on his recent experiences installing and using Money Dance see:  {http://moneydance.net/}  as a replacement for Microsoft Money.   A key part of his installation was locating a Java runtime that was available in RPM and compatible with Mandrake.   He ended up using the runtime from the IBM JDK   that has IBMJava2-JRE-1.3-1.0.i386.rpm.  Alan reports that Money Dance has some additional features over MS-Money, and a few that are missing, but so far it is a full replacement for MS-Money in his opinion.

Alan also recommended IglooFTP-PRO V1.0.0 {see: http://www.littleigloo.org/ }  that works like Win-FTP and can be downloaded at the Little Igloo site.  If you like it, order/registration is just $29.95.

With the NIC card working in the e-machine, Dick Foerster demonstrated a PHP "Membership Roster" project he is working on.   The roster includes pictures of members of the Kiwanis Club of Redlands, as well as address and other personal information for each member.  With 60+ members in the database, response was very quick at all workstations on the Intranet in his office.  Records were pulled up in a Win-95/IE-3.0/ 8mb RAM system and a 366mhz Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 based system with equal ease.

Alan demonstrated a *trick* to copy information from a terminal window to another window or a KDE application like Netscape, which he will write up for inclusion on our 'Tips' page. 

We also discussed Alan's PMFirewall  implementation {see: }.  
Alan set up a system to provide firewall services  {ppp0} in front of his other workstations.  He is using IP masquerading to allow individual internet access at each station.  In this installation, PMFirewall is started during boot-up.   Dick's implementation  is set up to protect an individual workstation, and can be turned on or off manually.  The PMFirewall distribution files include a man page that   minimally documents the commands and general operation.  Dick will post a write-up about the operation and available commands on OneList in the next few days.

Other topics of discussion included: Drive Image 3.0 from PowerQuest and TopPage from IBM.

Drive Image 3.0  now includes support for Linux, creating image files for Ext2 and Linux SWAP file systems.  PowerQuest Corportation is the maker of BootMagic.  

TopPage  is a wysiwyg HTML editor for Linux that may be of interest.  Unfortunately, it runs under WINE.  

The next meeting is scheduled for July 8^th, so mark your calendar.

The meeting adjourned at 1:30 pm.