[ccoss] Re: woohoo! first post!

dave wrote:

>hey all,
>
>glad to see this is up and running, many thanks to Chris for his time 
>and effort (i'm sure there are others, i just don't know them yet, thanks!).
>
>I guess I'll start this off, we'll see if anyone else has subscribed 
>yet, hehe.
>
>I was at the last meeting, but I only really met Chris and Pete Santoro, 
>so I'll introduce myself quickly.
>

I was just at Pete's house last Friday. We had a good conversation about 
outsourcing, what he was doing with Linux, and programming techniques. 
It's nice to have a small community.

>
>My name's Dave Rodriguez, and I work at Integralis in East Hartford as a 
>Professional Services Engineer. We do Network security, mostly 
>Checkpoint firewalls, but others as well, including Cisco PIX and some IDSs.
>
>Anyway, as I'm sure you can imagine, my interests are somewhat 
>security-related....but not all. Right now, I would say I'm pretty 
>interested in finding the distribution for my mom (which is why Nick's 
>presentation interested me). I'd like to find a distribution that I can 
>just install, set up minimally (printers, internet connection, email, 
>etc.) and then almost forget. Package management is probably where most 
>distributions tend to confuse super-newbies, with dependencies and all. 
>Debian shines in this aspect, but installation/setup is pretty 
>intimidating. (Which is why I'm excited by the debian-installer project 
>and RedHat's Anaconda being ported to Debian). Knoppix's setup is 
>getting there, but the huge number of programs in the menu (after 
>installation) can also confuse, which is why I like Gnome's (and others) 
>task-oriented menus.
>

Peter Santoro is using Slackware as his distribution. He created tag 
files to automate the package selection during the installs because he 
was installing to more than one machine because he's converting his 
household to all Linux from Windows. He is using an open source program 
called SWareT, http://www.swaret.org/index.php. " swaret is a script to 
help keep your Slackware System up-to-date." It works like apt-get in 
Debian. He likes the fact that Slackware doesn't change the 
configuration style from version to version. I am using an older version 
of Slackware, 8.0 on my laptop. What I would like to do is to save all 
my data, including configuration files, and then remove that version and 
install a newer version. I would like to see if I can create a bootable 
CD from files I've downloaded. In summary, I want to start fresh and 
know about what I changed to configure my system. On my desktop, I'm now 
using SuSE, which is what I'm using now. I've downloaded a DVD player, 
which doesn't work as well as the Windows player that came with the DVD 
rewriter, but it works. I tried installing the Java interpretter for 
Mozilla on SuSE but was discouraged. So I'm starting to learn ways to 
install software that doesn't come on the installation CDs. I haven't 
upgraded anything I can remember.

>
>Anyway, I'll cut this short with a couple comments on the upcoming 
>meetings. I liked Pete Atkins' idea about meeting for coffee. The 
>informal nature is what appeals to me, as it gives up the opportunity 
>for the back-and-forth that a presentation-style meeting lacks. "What 
>distro do you use? Why? Did you experience this problem? Did you solve 
>it?", that sort of stuff. I guess we could do it via the mailing list, 
>too, but the face time is important, I think.
>
I like meeting once in a while but getting timely answers by email at my 
convenience. Novel ideas are valid in CCOSS. We can try to experiment 
with things to see what works and what doesn't. For example, this 
mailing list is an experiment. Also, having everyone present is a novel 
idea.

>
>I also liked Chris' idea regarding 5-10 mins per person for 
>mini-presentations. I would be willing to talk on my choice of distro, 
>Debian, since I don't think there was anyone else using it.
>

Also, I think it's less intimidating to have to prepare only 5 minutes 
worth of material. Once you're done with that, you can do it again and 
again. In theory, by the time you know it, you'll have over an hour's 
worth of information packaged up in a way that may be useful for others. 
You just have to have the discipline to write down what you experienced 
so you can remember it.

>
>Regarding dates, I can do Dec 8th and later, with the 14th (if 
>available) being preferred since it's a Sunday and I know I'll be home 
>(I travel often for work).
>

I got a note back from the librarian about the 14th who said, "Sorry - 
it is taken." December 8th and 11th look like a possibilities. Dave 
Farrington said, "I can meet on either Thursday...As of Jan 1, that time 
on Sunday will be good for me as well." I spoke to Lynne Mardoc on the 
phone, and she had me cross off the 1st, 4th, and 11th. I don't know how 
flexible she is. That knocks off both Thursdays. So I emailed Dave 
Farrington about the 8th. The 8th is ok for Dave Rodriguez. I'm going to 
wait until tomorrow and contact some people as we narrow down the dates 
to a couple. I think it would be a good project for me to write a 
program on the Web server that would tally everyone's availability.


>
>thanks again!
>Dave Rodriguez
>
>
>
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>  
>



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