ACLUG Meeting & Linux News

[John Goerzen ACLUG <aclug@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello everyone,

This message has two important announcements: we've got an ACLUG
meeting coming up, and various news about Linux that comes from the
Linux Expo I attended last week.

First, the info about the meeting:

When:           7:30 PM on Thursday, June 4, 1998
Where:          Room 205 in Jabara Hall on the campus of Wichita State
                University.  Jabara Hall says "Computing Center" on
                the front.  Driving directions can be found at
                http://www.aclug.org/maps/
Topic:          TBA
Invited:        Everyone!  All ACLUG events are free and open to the
                public.

Our meetings are open to the public.  The format that has been used in 
the past is a presentation of some sort followed by general Q & A and
machines available for hands-on experimentation with Linux.

I hope to put details about this meeting on the website...  but I have 
been busy catching up from the trip to the Expo so I may not get
around to that until this evening.

I have not yet decided on a topic for a presentation.  If you have any 
suggestions, please let me know ASAP so I can at least prepare a
little bit for it :-)  Below, you'll find news from the Linux Expo,
some of which may be good for this.

There is a lot happening in the Linux world these days!  As I type this, I'm
traveling home from the Linux Expo held last week in Durham, NC.  Here are a
few highlights:

 * There are a lot of enhancements planned for the Linux filesystem, ext2fs.
   Planned enhancements can more than double performance in some situations.
   Dealing with extremely large files, say 100meg or greater, will be much
   faster as well.  In the future, we can also expect either a complete
   elimination of fsck or at least a very different fsck since the
   filesystem will be largely self-repairing in the event of a power
   failure.

 * RedHat 5.1 is out.  The big news is that it now comes standard with
   Linuxconf, a very nice system configuration system.  I am doing research
   into the possibility of integrating Linuxconf into Debian 2.1.
   The bad news is that RedHat made a mistake with the 5.1 release -- you'll
   need to get a security update before you use it as a server.

 * Richard Stallman made a surprise appearance at the Expo.  If you are
   familiar with Stallman, you'll know that anywhere he goes, something
   exciting happens.  The Expo was no different; more on this below.

 * Linus Torvalds outlined plans for the upcoming release of kernel 2.2 and
   future development work on 2.3.  There are several enhancements that will
   be seen in 2.2; a few are better multi-platform support, much faster SMP
   code, better filesystem code (some of the things explained above),
   Video for Linux, and a whole bunch of support of new hardware.

 * Corel demonstrated their new network computers that are running Linux.

 * Sun demonstrated UltraPenguin/UltraLinux, which is a port of Linux
   to the 64-bit UltraSparc platform.  It should be ready for prime time
   in a couple of months.

 * Some features for using Linux to achieve server redundancy where
   discussed.  It is possible to have one Linux server automatically take
   over the full duties of another if there is some sort of hardware
   failure.

 * There will be another Expo-style event in Atlanta in October.
   There are details at http://www.ale.org for this one.  I don't know
   much about it, but they had some signs up at this LinuxExpo, so I
   thought I'd mention it anyway.

 * There is work progressing on a Linux Standard Base project,
   which will provide greater similarity between the base of different
   distributions as well as easier installation of commercial software.

 * GNOME development is coming along well.  GNOME is a free windowing
   environment (more than just a window manager) that is layered on top
   of the popular GTK toolkit of GIMP fame.

 * Two commercial database vendors demonstrated Linux releases of their
   products.

 * Lars Wirzenius gave an interesting talk on Linux anecdotes and history,
   and some surprising ways to be a practical joker with Linux <grin>

 * Greg Badros discussed an NFS disk-caching system for Linux.

 * Alan Cox talked about space aliens and mice, among other things.

 * Linux's role in the visual effects in Titanic (a cluster of 150 Linux
   Alphas) and Pixar were demonstrated.

 * And more...

Thanks,
John Goerzen

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