Hello Luggers!

So far, I’m unaware of an upcoming topic for this month’s meeting on Wednesday, June the 29th.

I was out walking, listening to Linux podcasts, and got an idea. How about YOU pick a distribution that you’d like to see, and I’ll install it, and bring it to this upcoming Wednesday’s meeting so that everyone can take a look at it.

If there’s another plan for the meeting, I’ll happily set this aside, but otherwise, the offer is open.

So if anyone will send a message to either the njlunux-discussion, or the meetup.com mailing lists
with the distro that you’d like to see, and I’ll tally them up, and try to install (and get working) the most popular one.

I’ll call an end to the voting at 5pm on Sunday, to give me a little time to get it working.

Suggestions? Slackware, Ubuntu 11.04, Fedora 15, Linux Mint?

And now, a few words from our location sponsor.

As many of you know, we meet at a new venue where, for no
fee, we have full use of their facility (don’t forget, unlike
Mike, they are not LUG members) so, out of decency, we need to
keep them informed as to how many members are coming and also if
‘none’ are going. Having them set up the room and staying late to
accommodate us and no one shows could endanger our relationship
with them, so ‘PLEASE’ let us know if you are coming or not by
clicking http://NJLinux.com/Directions and RSVPing Yea or Na.
Here you will also see clear directions on the new location.

We’ve tried the discussion board thing in the past and it just never got used, which is ok except that it required a level of administration that was not equitable based on its use. So we canned it.

But, an IRC channel on irc.freenode.com is free and virtually painless to operate because Freenode does all the work. So what the heck we’ll give it a go. I started and registered the #njlinux channel earlier today. I should have the formal registration approval soon but the channel is up and going now, so come chat anytime.

If you have never used IRC then you should give it a try. If you don’t like it you can at least say you have tried it. Your current distro whatever it may be likely has a chat client installed. If not, the most common clients are xchat and irssi. I have used them both and they both work well.

When I first made my full time move to Linux I regularly sought help with problems through IRC. There will undoubtedly be a channel on the topic you require or are interested in, and if Freenode doesn’t provide for that particular topic then some other network likely will. It’s a great tool to have in your general purpose toolbox. If you’re completely green to IRC then you can find many good tutorials on-line that will get you going.

Cheers,

njlinuxmike (a.k.a. “raido” on the IRC)

Hello:

We’ve discussed at the last few meetings that there’s a need for change in communication with group members.

From those who responded in a recent informal poll, there was an overwhelming opinion that the mailing list was the preferred means of communication but we’ve seen that we need more interactivity as it’s been lacking somewhat in the current system, which Nick and Larry have graciously been providing for many years.

Mike has set up new mailing list software on one of the LUG’s machines, and we’ll be moving the users from the old mailing list to both the NJLinux-announce and the NJLinux-discussion lists.

Users that do not want to be on one or both of the lists can simply follow the directions to be removed through the instructions on the bottom of any of the announcements, or by just letting us know, so that you can
be removed manually.

Hopefully, though, all of the current users will stay and contribute to the community that we are trying to promote. We wanted to set up the new discussion list in an effort to be able to more easily get feedback and information from the members in order to arrange events like Software Freedom Day, the Revolution OS screening, etc.

So please, join us, join the discussion, and hopefully we can make the group more active and productive.

Thanks,
–Bob

NJLinux is moving to a Mailman based mailing list system for its meeting announcements and has started a discussion list for general LUG discussion. You can sign up through the links at the right under the LUG Links section, or HERE for the meeting announcements. And HERE for th discussion list.

Over the next month we will be migrating the old meeting announcement list to both new lists. Once that is done, you will be able to control your own subscription status.

Cheers

Mike