[glug-t] Minutes

I reached Accel IT Academy at about 9:45am, a small group of people
were already waiting at the meeting place. By 10:15 the strength was
about 25 and we decided to start the meeting.

We started off with a short self introduction of the gathered
members. As decided in the previous meeting the topics were
Partitions and Boot sector basics, Windows and GNU/Linux software
comparison and IP Masquerading. 

The introduction was followed by a presentation on partitions and boot
sectors by Manik. He began with the physical structure of a hard disk,
explaining terms like platters, heads, sectors, tracks, cylinders. He
then moved on to the need for partitions, how it all works, explaining
jargons like primary partition, extended partition, logical
partitions, MBR, Partition table. Though he stumbled at a place or
two, the hackers present were benevolent enough to correct
him. Throughout he was bombarded with questions on partitions, which
brought out points less obvious to gnubies. Questions like "How
does one re-install LILO after installing windows?", "What if he didn't
make a boot disk?", etc. were answered.

Hemant took over, and explained how to optimally partition the disk. (I
still do not agree with the thumb rule that the swap size should be
twice the size of the available RAM. It used to be that way, when we
had just 8MB, or 16MB of RAM. Now with 512MB of RAM allotting 1GB is
ridiculous. BTW why would one need swap if he had 512MB of RAM?) He
also spoke about partitioning tools. Questions were raised on
partitioning tools, that can resize partitions
non-destructively. Somebody suggested Partition Magic. Now heres were the
GNU/Linux User Group differs from a plain vanilla Linux User
Group. The humble meeting coordinator(myself ;-) shot in with a big
warning sign, telling him that the software was proprietary. Alternatives like
parted, and fips were suggested.

By then our next speaker Mr. Balaji a system administrator at SASTRA
had arrived. He started with a comparison between GNU/Linux and
Windows hardware support. Throwing in figures from various surveys to
support his statements. It showed us all that the GNU/Linux system had
a clear edge over the poorly designed, and excessively sugar coated
OS. He then moved on to the software comparison, listing out various
free browsers, music players, mail clients, administration tools...
Oh! I almost forgot. He gave me a CD containing some software, so that
others can have a copy of it. Well, we would like to thank him for it.
Unfortunately the CD contains some non-free software. I did not refuse
immediately because that would be more indecent. But it would be very
kind of him if he can get us another CD without the non-free
software. Heres what RMS would say if he were given a CD containing
non-free software - 

"Thank you very much for offering me this nice piece of software. But
I cannot accept it in good conscience on the conditions that you have
set. So I'm going to do without it. No thank you."

The next was a much awaited talk by Benjamin on IP
Masquerading. Benjamin with his humorous ways appealed to both the
hackers and gnubies alike. He first explained the literal meaning of
masquerade, and how it related to IP masquerading. He brushed on the
basics, and then moved on to configuring a system for masquerade. He
also told us about the limitation of masquerade. And compared to other
setups like proxies. (I dont exactly remember the order of his
presentation. This should teach us, to write the minutes as early as
possible). But he did give us all sufficient knowledge base to build
upon. His explanation was sprinkled with humorous quotes.

Before we concluded the meeting, we spoke about our new website
http://glugt.linuxisle.com, our mailing list, and about
getting an LCD projector. We also decided to setup a CD library, that
would be maintained by the GLUG-T. Projects that the group could
possibly undertake were discussed. By then it was already 2:00pm! The
meeting was concluded with next meetings topics- Threading
programming, The GNU philosophy, and GNU/Linux certification.

C-x C-c
(Thats how we say goodbye in Emacs
;-)

---------------------------------------------
This message was sent from RECTMAIL.
http://www.rect.edu/ or http://rangoli.rect.ernet.in/


---------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe send a mail to glug_t-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with 'unsubscribe' 
as subject.
Website: http://glugt.linuxisle.com

Other related posts: