Charles Campbell's notes on the November 19, 2002 meeting.

I displayed my T-Shirt and Cap from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and again urged the members to support its efforts to head off the Hollywood suits, Software Moguls, and Publishers who are trying to lock up copyright and "Digital Rights Management" in ways that could destroy the Open Source Movement, Linux, and the Internet. The least we could do AND EVERY ONE OF US SHOULD DO SOMETHING is to join the Electronic Frontier Foundation to become better informed AND MAKE A CONTRIBUTION!

We had two presentations. First, John Moore led us through Sections Four and Five of his tutorial, then Stephen Britton gave an overview of Mandrake 9.

John's Tutorial is on this Web Site at the "Lessons in Linux" link above, but being led through it by John is better than trying to make your way through it alone, though John urged us to try.

John's topic was "Regular Expressions." As he pointed out, everything (well, practically everything) in Unix/Linux is text files and learning how Linux uses text to perform tasks can be useful, not only to understand and often customize applications, but to cobble up some simple expressions to do housekeeping chores.

To make his point, John showed how to use them to make a simple address book (see Lesson Five). His point was that while it is primitive, it works, could be written in a couple of hours instead of a couple of weeks, and is the point of departure for enhancements. It was pointed out that this is 90% of what people want, but so easy as to be unmarketable, so Micro$oft and others make their living by adding the missing 10% and charging for it.

In response to popular request after the previous meeting's review of RedHat8.0, Stephen Britton of Seventh Avenue Technology Group gave us his impressions of the newly-released Mandrake 9.0 distribution. Unlike most of the other distributions, which started life as servers and were later ported to the desktop, Mandrake, a French distribution, was developed for the desktop from the beginning. This probably explains why it is so user-friendly. Its hassle-free install comes with lots of software drivers and many experts recommend it to first time Linux users, especially to Windows users, because Mandrake offers an extrensive GUI configuration system. Stephen said Mandrake handles USB peripherals well, including his digital camera and scanner. Also, the standard Mandrake distro comes with OpenOffice 1.0 which is perfect for businesses.

Stephen believes Mandrake is probably the greatest Linux threat to the Micro$oft monopoly because of its ease of installation and Windows-like interface. He showed that installing Mandrake and OpenOffice 1.0 instead of Windows XP Pro and XP Office Standard Edition can save a business owner at least $534 per seat, not counting down-time for system crashes and endless up-grades.