[Plug-announce] March Newsletter

Wed, 1 Mar 2000 19:40:43 -0700

PLUG-INS

The Electronic Newsletter of the Phoenix Linux User Group

Volume 1
Issue 4
March, 2000

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Meeting Info
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The March meeting schedule is as follows:

The Thursday Meeting

When: March 9, 2000
Where: Scottsdale Boys & Girl Club
Time: 7:00 p.m.
Topic: Software Configuration Management

The Saturday Meeting

Saturday, Februrary 26th, 2000 was the last meeting to be held in Inficad's
training room.  Inficad has decided to use the room for other purposes as
they no longer provide training, and havn't for the past few months.  We
would like to thank them for keeping this room available to us for as long
as they have.

There are no future Saturday meetings planned at this time.  As always, the
option is open for anyone who would like to coordinate future meetings.

Viking Systems will be hosting future west side meetings with topics and
times to be announced shortly.  Keep and eye on Viking Systems web page for
further information.

Ken

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Mailing lists
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The mailing lists were moved on the first of Feb over to a server at Wired
Global (Thanks Jay :) using Mailman as the server software. We've added
archiving for the lists. The hide your email address function doesn't work
as well as we'd like, but it's a start :). There are web-based and
email-based subcription mechanisms.

http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo.cgi links to the 4 lists:
PLUG-announce, PLUG-devel, PLUG-discuss and PLUG-security. discuss is
subscribed to announce, so no reason to join both. The listnames and domain
changed slightly, so please update address book entries where appropriate.

We did run accross a couple of bugs in the original setup, but those were
alleviated by updating the mailman package (thanks again Jay).  Please make
a correction to your preferences if using Netscape >4.6 for mail.

    Edit the two .js files in your .netscape directory (liprefs.js and
preferences.js) to include the function call:
    user_pref("mail.suppress_sender_header", true);
    BTW, the binary includes a comment which says that this is only
necessary on Unix.

    Since Communicator regenerates this file upon exit, the change must be
done when Communicator is not currently running.      With the next start,
it will stop adding the Sender: header and things start to work like a charm
again.

Thanks to Art Wagner for finding this fix and passing it on!

If you experience any problems, please pass them on to the list
administrators, e.g. PLUG-<listname>-admin@lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us.

We wish to again thank Eric for hosting the lists all these years (7)! The
move gives us the chance to directly change list preferences (and therefore
also get the flames for making changes instead of subjugating Eric to them
:).

Eric put a cool message on the old list addresses for those of us that
forgot to update our addressbooks before posting :). Here it is:

++
If you are looking for the PLUG mailing lists, they've moved. See:

        http://lists.PLUG.phoenix.az.us/mailman/listinfo.cgi

A Bit of history (heh, heh :-)

Dean Troyer, Rusty Carruth and Eric Johnson started the Phoenix Linux Users
Group (PLUG) sometime around 1992-3, as an offshoot of the dearly departed
Advanced Programming SIG of the Phoenix PC Users Group. Pretty nearly
continuously since then, the PLUG mailing lists have provided the primary
forum(s) for the group and its only membership definition. If
you're on the list, you're in PLUG.

On February 1, 2000, the lists moved to the address above, which is the
first time in the group's history that the lists haven't been maintained by
a "founder".

It's been interesting to watch the group grow and change, and it's
especially gratifying to know that I was there "when". When getting a Linux
"distribution" meant downloading HJ's boot/root disks. When the Linux
network stack would occasionally just go haywire and arp flood your LAN (so
hosting the PLUG list on a Linux box on my then employer's LAN was genuine
excitement). When letting go of BSD/386^H^H^HOS (tried and true,
bulletproof: but hey, they just weren't interested in what I thought of the
"new" license) and betting my business on Linux was anything but a sure
thing. But Linux had the "right" license...

I've heard it said: "I've seen a lot of changes in my time, and I've been
against every one of them."

I haven't really done that much for Linux, in the scheme of things, but not
much isn't nothing. So I thought it was apropos to just jot down these
thoughts as I cut off the mailing lists I've maintained for 7 years; send
these bits in a bottle to whomever reads them, looking for PLUG...

And I'm sure the best is yet to come.

Eric Johnson (plug@mpps.com)
January 31, 2000
++

Dean, Rusty and Eric did Phoenix a good deed by starting PLUG. If for no
other reason it gets der.hans and Jiva off the street once a month ;-).

ciao,

der.hans

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The Addresses
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Me  farli@wiredglobal.com
PLUG		http://plug.phoenix.az.us