:: Meeting Highlights (including pictures) ::

By: Christopher Young

LEAP-CF General Meeting
January 18, 2001

The January 2001 general meeting did not go without its problems. One of ours speakers had difficulty getting to the meeting, so we took advantage of the opportunity and opened up the floor for general and technical Linux-related questions.

As you can see in the photo below, many members brought their Linux machines and hooked right into the high speed internet connection that the DeVry University has at every table! Like always, all LEAP meeting attendees are welcome to bring a computer and jack in!

Just a few of the meeting attendees

The meeting started off in the usual manner by having everyone introduce themselves and then LEAP President Phil Barnett and LEAP Vice-President Chris Young headed up the discussion on some of the major Linux news of the last month. Obviously, the biggest topic was the release of the Linux 2.4 kernel, which several LEAP members attending indicated they are already using.

Max Lang, aka. 'The Slackman'!

Chris Young reviewed the summary of a DHBrown report titled "Linux, How Good is It?" that was published two years ago. Chris had given a short presentation on this report two years earlier which classified Linux as "not ready for the enterprise". Some of the reasons given for this assessment were: SMP scalability issues, file size limitations, physical memory limits, the lack of a journaled filesystem and high availability issues.

The great thing about this report is that (with the exception of a journaling filesystem, which should be included in the Linux 2.4.1 kernel), the Linux 2.4.0 kernel has met all of these shortcomings! It would be extremely interesting to see DHBrown report on Linux again in a few months.

Once both speakers were available and ready, the presentation of "Building Software with GNU Tools" began by LEAP members David Billsbrough and Max Lang. David provided a brief overview of what a regular C application looks like, the concept of compiling, along with several other concepts, such as stripping a binary. Max Lang continued the presentation, by taking a couple of packages and attempting to compile them. Max had intentionally tried to find a few tar.gz packages that wouldn't compile correctly, so he could show how to watch for errors and fix obvious source code errors. This presented everyone in the room a chance to exercise our brainpower to see if we could get a PDP emulator going, but there was nothing obvious about the error, the code looked fine, so we moved on. Like so many source code compiles, "some worked, some didn't". Thanks again to Max and David for volunteering their time so that other could learn!

Max and David explaining Linux compiling

Thanks to the excellent facilities provided by the DeVry University, getting our Linux systems networked was easier than ever! Each workarea in the room has a popup power station with network jacks. And DeVry provides DHCP, so getting up and running takes no time at all. With this new capability, it has become practical for LEAP to begin the planning of web casting our meetings to the Internet. A LEAP member who resides in Chicago, Jack Beglinger, has been wanting to do webcasting since he moved earlier this year!

So, it was a pretty good meeting. As always, many of us retreated to a local restraurant to discuss various topics.

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