On Wednesday 16 Nov 2005, VAGUE had our November meeting. As per suggestion in the October meeting, this month was supposed to be a couple of mini-presentations, around 10-15 minutes. I volunteered to give one about Gentoo Linux, and Sam Hooker volunteered to give one about distributed monitoring with Nagios.
After settling in, we decided I’d go first … a which point my 10 minute Gentoo presentation turned into 45 minutes. Luckily, I’m not responsible for all that time, as there were some good questions and discussion… but it was an utter travesty of time-estimation, to be sure. Sam’s presentation took about 30 minutes, also in part due to a lot of questions and discussion about how Nagios might be used generally, and how Sam specifically is making use of it.
After the presentations, we had a round discussion about future events, generally deciding that my desire to upgrade my laptop doesn’t mean we should necessarily do an install-fest … and that it’s probably more important to have application- and desktop-level demonstrations available if we’re really interested in externally promoting the group and trying to encourage people to realize that Linux is a step forward, not backward. There was some discussion about the directions of the various distributions and package management systems therein, in part due to Paul Flint joining us after moving into the area and bringing some Ubuntu 5.10 CDs from the recent UbuntuBelowZero developers conference in Montréal to proselytize with.
Rion D’Luz talked about his desire to start an organization similar to the Portland Open Source Source Software Entrepreneurs (POSSE) … maybe even “VOSSE” … organizing Vermont Open-Source software entrepreneurs to be available to the wider business community for open-source presentation and consultation.
We talked a bit about a regular meeting date, and decided that Thursdays were generally good for people who were there (and a couple who weren’t). As such, a future meeting date of Thursday 15 Dec was proposed. Unfortunately I won’t be able to attend, as I’ll be in California for work that week, but I’m glad to see a possibly-regular meeting time (3rd Thursday of the month) coalescing.