[H-GEN] Room Bookings Update

[Paul Gearon]

On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Arjen Lentz <arjen at lentz.com.au> wrote:
<snip/>
> These days everybody has a computer, and Internet. Most just use it,
> and don't care that much about what's going on inside.
> SOME will have some hassles with how things work and need a bit of
> help, and a FEW will want to dig more and see what makes it tick.
>
> HUMBUG is about the latter two, I would think. But do remember where
> THEY come from (as opposed to where WE [the old hands] come from), as
> it's different worlds entirely.

While HUMBUG supports the latter two, I thought it was also a place
for like-minded people to meet up, swap stories, expertise, etc. The
danger in that is that it can alienate new people, so it has to be
balanced.

>> As far as I can remember we have always been Windows
>> hostile.  Seems reasonable to me, as we are essentially an
>> open source club.
>
> It does not seem reasonable to me at all.
>  a) there are a lots of OSS apps and tools for the Windows platform.
> Think Firefox and OpenOffice, to keep it very very simple.
>  b) anyone even remotely interested in running an OSS OS will 99.99%
> certainly be running Windows now.

I agree with these statements.

I've always been a little hazy on this policy at HUMBUG. Once upon a
time it was decreed that Windows should not appear at a meeting, but I
always thought that the line between Windows an *nix systems to be a
little blurry. For instance:
1. Setting up SAMBA to talk to a Windows machine. You need to be
running your exact Windows configuration on the network to see if you
really got it right.
2. Setting up dual boot systems.
3. Configuring Cygnus or U/Win, coLinux (or if you want to go back in
time, Lin4Win), etc, on Windows. These create *nix-like environments
in Windows.

Initially, I don't believe that HUMBUG was about open source software,
though it seems to have evolved that way now, and I can see that you
(Arjen) believe that it is about OSS. So has the club formally moved
to include OSS (I think it might have, but I'm not so diligent at
reading minutes of meetings)?

> Having a box of Ubuntu CDs handy (ordered from shipit,ubuntu.com)
> might be good. Apart from being very kind to simple users (with liveCD
> and installer combined), if you stick the CD into a Windows box it
> also contains some of the most common OSS stuff for Windows; so it's
> all-in-one. Naturally, some among you will insist that Ubuntu sucks
> and brand Y is clearly better and must be used, however I would
> suggest to you that if a person is somehow enticed to use Ubuntu,
> that's a win for Linux. So don't be too picky.

Sounds like a good idea. I'd recommend other distros as well. Some
people like choice.

Regards,
Paul Gearon