July 21st's Minutes

["Justin Miller" <jmiller@xxxxxxxx>]

In attendance of July 21st's meeting was Adam Williams, Craig Soucie, Bruce
Smith, Robert Brown, Jim Wallace, and Justin Miller. After the usual wait in
the lobby, everyone headed upstairs to begin the meeting. For everyone's
enjoyment, Cheesecake Brownies and Milk were served during the meeting.

At 6:43 Robert Brown began his informative presentation over CRON, entitled
"Accomplish Things While You're Gone! An Introduction to CRON." During the
course of his presentation, several examples of the use of CRON were
explored. Robert also emphasized many times during the presentation the
importance of the MAN pages. All slides used in the presentation should be
up on the web shortly.

After the presentation, the question "Should you update your kernel
everytime there is a new one?" Was brought up. It was explained that if you
are happy with your present kernel and if everything works properly there is
no foreseeable need to upgrade to the new kernel. The question "What is the
difference between patches and the whole source, and which is better?" was
raised. It was answered that patches are just the added or changed code
compared to the source of older kernel to update it to the new one, and
whole source is the entirely new source of the new kernel and is not
affected by the last kernel. This all lead into a general discussion over
features and advances in kernels. See the July 28th meeting entitled "The
New Linux: The 2.2 Kernels to come."

As the meeting when on, there was a discussion over just exactly what
Transmeta, the employer of Linus, does exactly. This was brought on by the
discussion of bootNet's interview with Linus Torvalds (See
http://www.bootnet.com/youaskedforit/lip_linux_manifesto.html), commenting
on several good points Linus made in the interview.

As the night progressed the discussion went towards the limitations imposed
by some vendors on what OS's companies, and home customers, can use with
their product. This continued on to cover the faults of some other operating
systems. Robert mentioned that a friend of his that works at Microsoft had
mentioned that NT and Win98 were totally messed up on the insides. This
discussion also mentioned that some magazines and news sources call the
choice between NT and Linux a "war" of some sorts.

The night finally wrapped up with a discussion on the aspects of getting Rob
Malda, the creator of Slashdot (See http://slashdot.org), and other people
with some ties to Linux, to make a guest presentation at KLUG meetings.