[conspire] CABAL meeting tomorrow (Saturday, June 25)

[Rick Moen]

Ross and Bruce have kindly volunteered to manage tomorrow's festivities
(reminder: 4 pm until around the witching hour).  For reasons I'll
explain, Deirdre and I will probably arrive later in the evening.

I'll have the network, power drops, and tables set up, and the Linux /
BSD distro collection on the kitchen table for those who want to borrow
or copy (http://linuxmafia.com/cabal/installfest/#distros).  There's a
couple of different types of beer, and I'll try to pick up some sort of
roast, this evening.  Ross, if you come early, you're welcome to pick
some blackberries for your sorbet effort, and please feel free to grab
all the fresh oranges on the windowsill, which are from a friend's tree
and quite delicious.

Newish distributions herewith noted:

o  Fedora Core 4, i386 and x86_64 flavours, full sets of each plus
   rescue disk CD.  By all accounts, the Red Hat / Fedora crowd have done
   a nice job.  Cutting-edge everything, including open-source Java
   tools advanced enough to run OpenOffice.org 2.0 betas and IBM
   Eclipse, without any sign of errors.   Released 2005-06-13.

o  Linspire "Five-O" 5.0 build 59 for i586.  This is one of the classic 
   novice-oriented distributions, normally sold shrink-wrapped only
   (no downloadable copies), but occasionally they have a promotion 
   where if you go to their e-store and enter a "coupon" code, you 
   can get an ISO for free.  In this case, the gratis download was
   either via http from their managed site (long wait) or BitTorrent.
   I still have the torrent seed file:  For your convenience, it'll be
   at http://linuxmafia.com/isos/ for a while.  

   The "coupon" code in this case was WelcomeLycoris, in recognition
   of Lycoris, one of the _other_ seldom-seen, no-download, novice 
   distributions, getting bought out by MandrakeSoft (er, Mandriva).
   So, Lycoris Desktop/LX, like Conectiva Linux, is going away and
   will be merged into Mandriva Linux.  Linspire is hoping to pick up
   some of the userbase.  

   Anyhow, Linspire (formerly "Lindows") is a Debian-derived KDE-based
   distribution with an easy installer and apps given simple names to 
   avoid confusing computer novices.   Released 2005-03-16.

o  Kanotix 2005-03 for i586 and x86_64.  As Bruce points out, Kanotix
   (a Knoppix on steroids) has been really good of late on the more 
   (otherwise) problemation laptops.  It's not quite as bleeding edge 
   as Fedora Core 4, but has all the funky proprietary wireless drivers,
   NdisWrapper, etc.  KDE-oriented, fully designed for HD installation 
   (in contrast to Knoppix itself), even includes the OpenOffice.org 2.0 
   pre-release.  Released 2005-06-06.

o  Gnoppix 1.0 for i586.  This is, of course, the GNOME flavour of
   the Knoppix installable live CD -- and they finally hit 1.0.  
   There's a large amount of overlap between Gnoppix and Ubuntu, 
   and I get the impression that Ubuntu's live-CD edition _is_ Gnoppix.
   Released 2005-06-14.



Anyhow, the reason my household will be away until sometime during the
middle of the CABAL meeting is we don't want to miss our annual
beginning-of-summer rituals -- something without which it just doesn't
seem like a proper summer at all:  the Midsummer's Day ("Midsommar")
festival at Sveadal, a lush little resort / settlement in the hills
southwest of Morgan Hill, built by the local Swedish community 111 years
ago.

Midsummer is a very big occasion in Scandinavia generally (that
high-latitude relief-from-winter thing), but especially among the
Swedes, so they go quite wild with feasting, colourful dress, raising of
a garlanded maypole, and dancing & music until midnight.  You most
certainly don't need to be Swedish to celebrate with them (I'm not), and
it's a lot of fun.  We wouldn't miss it.

Details are at:  http://www.sveadal.org/midsummer.html

I just noticed that hitting up http://images.google.com/ about "Sveadal"
brings up some evocative photos.