Live in southern Ontario? Attending dinner meetings is free.

PegaSoft's February Dinner Meeting

Date: February 16, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Location: Orwell's Pub
                                                                                
Attendance

Ken B, Mel W, William P, Robert B, Mike H, Alex B, Jeff D

Meeting Business

Dan's Leave of Absense

Dan Braun, partner with Ken Burtch for PegaSoft, has announced an indefinite
leave of absence due to family business.  Dan will not be attending meetings
and will not be involved in the room booking project.

New Mailing Lists

Ken installed Majordomo and set up four new mailing lists.  The mailing list
page on the web site has been updated.  No problems were reported with the
new lists.

Annual Membership Renewals

PegaSoft memberships are $45.00 per year.

Although you don't need to be a member in order to join the mailing
lists or attend our monthly dinner meetings, membership entitles you to
discounts on PegaSoft events and the opportunity to participate in
PegaSoft projects and teach in our workshops. Membership also allows
you to attend our annual PegaSoft Summer Retreat.

Deferred.

Open Forum - In the News
[Opinions are that of the participants.]

Headline: FireFox 1.1 release date pushed back to April [ZDNet-UK]

Open Source projects typically have a "release early, release often"
philosophy--these releases are aimed at developers who can fix minor
bugs in the source code.  FireFox's decision to do thorough testing
recognizes that the end users are not developers.

FireFox usage now accounts for about 5% of all browsers which is a
great accomplishment compared to the size of the market.  Microsoft
Internet Explorer is down to
90% and IE 7 will be released later this year instead of a part of
Microsoft Longhorn.  The big draw of Firefox is security: it is a portable
browser and not directly tied to the operating system (unlike IE 7).

Jeff cited the speed of FireFox was causing one school board to consider
switching to FireFox.  His core web applications ran about twice
as fast on FireFox than on IE.

So much money was donated to FireFox advertising that they will be running
several ads in the New York Times.

Headline: LinuxWorld Canada will be held on April 18-22.

Robert B. will be hosting a seminar at LinuxWorld but the topic has not be
set.

Members' Projects

Slackware USB Key Drive Thin Client (William P)

A thin client is a computer with no drives.  One way to use thin clients is
to act as a terminal that runs software from a server computer--a typical
Pentium 4 computer can host 50 people in this way.  Old, slow computers can
be converted to thin clients so that software runs quickly on the server
computer and the slow computer only has to work on displaying the information.
When many users are using are only running simple applications like a web
browser or word processor, there's no reason for them to have a "power machine"
on their desk.  Thin clients also reduce the number of components which is
better for the environment.

William put a basic Slackware installation configured for remote desktops on
a 256 M USB key drive.  The key drive also has remote Windows software so the
computer can run either Windows or Linux software from a server computer.  It
doesn't rely on the Linux Terminal Project software.

In a school computer lab, if a computer fails, the user simply moves to the
next machine, plugs in the key drive, and is operating again.  However, it
requires a newer computer with the ability to boot from a USB device.

The Linux Terminal Project has been used successfully for some schools in the
United States.

Jeff promised to get William contact information for school boards and
umbrella organizations.

Business Shell - BUSH (Ken B)

Ken announced that the Business Shell was officially ported to FreeBSD and
was available as a FreeBSD package on the FreePorts web site.  This was a
milestone for BUSH as it was the first time BUSH has been accepted into an
operating system distribution.

Ken is currently working on a graphing package and MySQL support.  MySQL
support is necessary because of MySQL is the most popular open source
database--support would open BUSH up to many more potential users.  MySQL
was a popular request from users filling out the BUSH download polls.

The BUSH documentation is continuing to be revised.

BUSH Download Poll Feedback

Because it's hard to get information from users, people downloading BUSH are
asked to fill out an optional download poll.  Hundreds of people downloaded
BUSH and there have been 100 people who have filled out the poll.  The results
were posted on the web site.

The hardware and operating systems of users were reviewed.

Robert B was surprised by that Intel users only comprised 66% of all users.
Ken pointed out that the poll asked for all platforms that were used, not
the main platform.  There may be people with non-Intel platforms at work or
they may have old non-Intel machines at home.

Red Hat comprised 50% of all users only a few years ago, with Slackware /
Mandrake / SuSE dividing up most of the remainder.  Red Hat has dropped
to less than half of its former marketshare, possibly because of the problems
with the Fedora project.

Debian is popular with developers because of its solid testing, but the
release schedule (every 3 years) is too slow for most people and Debian is
difficult to install.

With Novell's acquisition of SuSE, SuSE may become a popular alternative for
people wanting an easy install with good hardware recognition.  Ken cited
problems with SuSE 9.1: he had to download a special version of FireFox and
Thunderbird would not run.  He had problems with 9.1 after doing an online
update which broke Konqueror.

Gen-Too had a very small marketshare.  It is hard to install and slow to
install because Gen-Too rebuilds all software for maximum performance.
Unfortunately, many machines are 99% idle making Gen-Too's performance
benefits secondary.

Room Booking Project Proposals

Starnix withdrew from the room booking project when the client announced that it
wasn't interested in selling hardware to schools.

Jeff, working for the client, answered questions about the room booking project.
The only firm deadline was that the software must be ready by September 1,
2006.  Jeff will enter the basic table information for users, facilities,
regions, rooms, etc.

Ken proposed a March 15 deadline for proposals.  It was pointed out that this
would be close to the next dinner meeting.  Proposals should be about 20
pages.  Preference would be given to people using the Business Shell as a
solution.  The proposal should outline the approach, tool choice and cost.
Suggestions of how to write a proposal are available on the PegaSoft web site.

Since the project will tie into Jeff's core software upgrade, it might be
beneficial to split off small projects for additional, part-time development.
Jeff offered to hold a demo of the current core software.

Next Meeting

Thursday, March 17, 2005.  This is St. Patrick's Day and the meeting location
may be moved because pubs are busy on this day.