Hi Everybody, Unfortunately, I will be unable to attend this evening's WLUG meeting due to a rotten cold and a low grade fever which I seem to have picked up somewhere. I would encourage all of you to meet this evening, and some brave soul who has been in WLUG for a long time can get up and run the meeting in my absence. Have a beer for me at the Boynton! Here is what I had planned to report to the group this evening. I would like somebody to read this to the group in case folks haven't checked their e-mail before the meeting. 1) WLUG financials I have consolidated the accounts so that all of the WLUG money is in an account at the Lowell Five bank in Chelmsford, MA. I just paid the $50 fee to join the Boston User Groups as was voted at a previous WLUG meeting, and I wrote myself a $75 check for refreshments for the calendar year 2001. That leaves us with approx. $575.00 in the bank, which has been raised through your donations as well as install fest proceeds. 2) Annual Linux Showcase This event was not attended nearly as well as in past years, due in part to the fear of flying and by the fact that many computer people have been recently laid off. There were only half as many vendors as in the past, again due to the economy, I suspect. I found the quality of the techinical talks to be very good. I heard talk that there wouldn't be an ALS next year, but that Maddog was pushing for a small number of more local conferences, perhaps one in Boston. Some cool things which I saw at ALS: a) Linux running on a Compaq iPAQ, one running X and an xterm, the other running Qt Embedded with a bunch of PDA like applications. Refer to http://www.handhelds.org for more information. b) Latest versions of Gnome and KDE in action c) A large number of kernel hackers (including Linus) on one room d) A cluster of small embedded computers built by Los Alamos National Labs, all running Linux out of FLASH memory. e) A great beer selection at the Pacific Coast Brewing Company I personally spoke to Jim Gettys and a representative from the Free Software Foundation (I think his name was Brad, but I have his card). I might be able to get one or both of these folks to come to WLUG to give a talk in the future. I guess I'll have to save the freebies until next month. See ya later, and have a great meeting! Andy -- Andy Stewart Founder Worcester Linux Users' Group Worcester, MA, USA http://www.wlug.org