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MEETING MINUTES: - 
September 8th 

Members attending the meeting included:   Richard Foerster,  Alan
Shoemaker,  Isaac Saldana , Mac Shaver, Jim Vassilakos, Gary Taylor, Ken Howels, Jim Lucha and  Klaus Herzog.  Special Guest: Todd Lyons, of  MandrakeSoft, also attended this meeting.

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, Hung Nguyen, Kandy Phan, Tad Peters, Don Evinger, and Craig Carignan. 

Alan brought along one of the Mandrake Techs, {Todd AKA Canonball}  who is working at the Pasadena office.  Todd provided some information on the new features of Mandrake 8.1.  One of the things he mentioned was devfs  which will create device nodes based on the hardware you have rather then a standard array.  We also spend some time discussing the 4 available journaling file systems that are available.  In addition to RiserFS, there is JFS {IBM}, EXT3 {which has the advantage of being backward compatible with EXT2, and XFS.

Todd mentioned that if you opt for EXT3, don't make the root EXT3 yet, since it always mounts as  EXT2 at the moment.  He also indicated that there are problems using Riser for /var.  The irony is that RiserFS excels in managing lots of small size files, many of which are found in /var.

Todd provided copies of the Mandrake Single Server Firewall,
Documentation and other materials for the Mandrake 8.0 boxed set, in addition to mousepads and other goodies.  Mac Shaver provided copies of ComputorEdge.

Forrest brought his system and provided a demonstration of a project  he has been working on using Zope  and the Zope Content Management Framework, called 'CMF'.    Zope is the premier open source content management company, and announced availability of Zope 2.4 which is available for download at their website.  Forrest explained that he is using CMF as a way to allow non-skilled users to manage their own content.  Zope can be run either as a server or it can be run as cgi.  It has a built in object database ZODB, which can be replaced or augmented with popular SQL databases, for example: ZMySQLDA-2.0.8 is now available. It requires MySQLdb 0.9.0 or newer.   There are tons of resources available at the Zope websites.

Ken Howels, told the group that he opted for a Handspring Visor,
because it runs the Palm O.S. and because of the plug in modules that are available for it.  Although he hasn't gotten it hooked up to his  Unix box yet,  it is just a matter of time.  Ken is also evaluating CASL and a way to develop programs.

The last part of this high energy meeting was spend in small group discussions on a variety of topics.  Todd, Isaac, and Jim Lucha
looked over some Perl code on Todd's laptop,  while  Jim Vassilakos, Klaus, and Forrest discussed the details of elm, pine, mutt and general mail configuration issues.

The meeting was a great success, and we are all looking forward to our next session on October 13 , 2001