KLUG Meeting Minutes and Agenda (#52) The 52nd meeting of the Kingston Linux User Group was held Tue, Feb. 11, 2003, 7:00PM at room 126, Jeffery Hall at Queens University. The meeting lasted until about 9:30. The attendees were: Conrad-Avarmaa, Brigitte Lott, Rodney Miller, George Mitton, Doug Murrel, Brian J. Nagy, Daniel Meeting Schedule: 53) Tue. Mar 11, 2003 - 54) Tue. Apr. 8, 2003 - 55) Tue. May 13, 2003 - Summary Of Activities: - Web page and domain - http://www.klug.on.ca/ - Hosted by Internet Kingston! (Thanks!) - We also have klug.ca registered. - Mailing List: Send an email with "subscribe klug-general" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - or "subscribe klug-security" in the body to majordomo@klug.on.ca - Usenet Group - kingston.os.linux (General, not just KLUG) Agenda/Minutes: 1) Roll Call and Introductions (if required) - See attendees above. 2) This Meeting: There were 6 attendees to our 37th presentation, "Distributions" by Daniel Nagy. Daniel researched this quite extensively so I'm not going to try to provide all that information here but I will summarize the cronology of the presented distributions. The first were "Soft Landing Linux" (SLS) and Watch Tower. These were early kernel versions and very hardware dependant. The installation was not really standardized and generally in a TAR archive format. Typically you required access to another installed system to compile the custom kernel required for your hardware. In the 1994/1995 time frame Linux 2.0 was released. This kernel version provided a module based system so that almost any hardware could be supported and opened the way for the distributions that we know today. The first package based distribution was Slackware about 1995. Slackware was followed by Debian, Red Hat and SuSe. Mandrake was released about the time we started KLUG (1998), and Caldera and Gentoo followed that. Daniel also commented on other major Linux changes such as a.out to ELF and the migration from libc5 to libc6 (glibc). Also mentioned were the various package formats such as .tgz, .dpkg and .rpm. Dependancy database and multi-lingual support were also mentioned as required. We also discussed some of the finer details of the Debian system as Daniel has a lot of experience in supporting it as well as a discussion of Linux booting techniques. The last topic covered was standards. FHS and LSB were discussed but since I didn't write enough notes I won't even try to cover that topic. That about wrapped up the evening and thanks to all who attended and participated. 3) Next Meeting: Tue. Mar 11, 2003 - TBD!