[ubuntu-arizona] Ubuntu-Arizona Weekly Newsletter, Issue #20

[Craig A. Eddy]

=== Summary of the October 21, 2007 meeting ===

Johnc4510 opened the meeting at 9:05 PM.

The first order of business was the introduction of new members.
kennymc0 is a student at DeVry <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeVry>, and will
have a final exam on Monday Morning at 7:00. He has been using Ubuntu
for about 2 years now. He also happens to be word's brother. paul928
introduced himself as Paul Westerman from Yuma. He's been using Ubuntu
since Warty Warthog. Theou then introduced himself as Mark from Phoenix.
A native. He has been using Ubuntu since just before 6.10 came out. We
welcome our new members, and are glad to have you with us.

Next order of business was announcements. Johnc4510 asked us how many
were using Gutsy Gibbon at this time. Most of us answered that we were.
The few who weren't were planning to with the availability of hardware
and time. Most people indicated that the installation went smoothly. The
few problems there were had to do with video cards and wireless
networking. And one member who's laptop installation was trashed by his
brother. The general opinion of Gutsy was that it ran very smoothly, had
lots of new toys to play with, and had a faster GUI than previous
releases. John reported that the same opinion appears to be shared all
around the world.

The next order of business was the report on the Education Committee.
br24 held a meeting on Friday evening to help provide some direction for
members to take. tyche has been working on re-categorizing the programs
under the Applications menu, and has submitted a preliminary version to
br24. tyche is using the database built into OpenOffice
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OpenOffice>.org to simplify making changes and
sorting the programs according to category. He has expressed his
willingness to work with anyone who wants to use it, particularly br24
and jsonder. Polygon89 reported that, now that the kernel has stopped
being updated on a daily basis, he has managed to get vbox working and
will try to get some screencasts out. He is looking for suggestions on
topics. jsonder reported that he has started working on the Guide, and
has some ideas laid out, mostly drawing on the Ubuntu wiki (
https://help.ubuntu.com/). Many things there are already done as
screencasts. He hopes to have some information to br24 this week, as
soon as he gets familiar with tyche's database and how to adapt it. br24
reported that he would try to have some preliminary material on the Team
wiki this week. John thanked the Education Committee for their hard work.

The next order of business was the Server Team. slofgren was unavailable
this evening so John filled in for him. The server address is
12.159.65.83. John will be purchasing a Domain sometime this week. The
domain name will be azloco.org, and John is considering getting
azloco.com as well, to avoid possible conflict further on. azloco.org
was decided on in previous meetings. There is a basic setup on it, and
anyone wanting access should email slofgren at  slofgren at gmail.com
<mailto:slofgren at gmail.com>. He will provide you with ssh access. John
and slofgren have been discussing getting a larger hard drive for the
computer. Since they do not have physical access to the computer, it was
decided to set this one up first and image it to a new (and larger)
drive, then send the drive to be installed in the computer. That would
reduce the interruption time with the computer. The DeVry
<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DeVry> LUG donated the use of the computer,
which is why we don't have physical access to it. we plan to use it for
team support and helping to bring the lugs of the state closer together
and anything else we can think of down the road. Now that the server is
up, we need to get a front page on it. John has requested help from the
members in developing one, particularly those members with HTML and CSS
knowledge and ability. SloggerKhan <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SloggerKhan>
has already come up with one possibility, but he really doesn't like it.
The mock-up he did can be seen at 
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=584696. John said that he would
try to get some volunteers during the week. paul928 suggested the
possibility of using nearlyfreespeech.net (
https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net/) for hosting the site, as the cost is
fairly minimal, and dependent on use, and instead of a flat fee. Their
servers run FreeBSD, which, though not Ubuntu Linux, is at least FOSS.
John asked him to email the information, and John would look it over.
The server team was also organized to help the team members learn the
basic principles of setting up a server and maintaining it.

The meeting was adjourned at 9:56 PM