PLUG Meeting 03

Introduction

This time round, we had 4 new members in our midst! Kui Seong, Eng Hin, Ching Mei, and Derek Lau. Say hello to everybody! Kui Seong brought in a NEC notebook for installation.

Activities

The afternoon started off with Squidster giving a welcome "speech" to the new members, after which launching into a (very) condensed history of Linux development during the last 8 years.

Just after the audience started to doze off and began to fall on the floor, Squidster quickly changed the topic to this meeting's agenda, which is a crash course on basic vi and HTML.

The audience was almost entirely Windows user with the exception of a new sysadmin of Digital Unix. As expected, everybody struggled with the initial learning curve, but everybody persisted, and in the end and managed to produce a satisfactory 2-liner worth of blood, sweat and tears (well, maybe not in that order! ;-). Only the most basic of the vi command set was shown in order not to have any information overload on our new Linux users. Advanced operations such as mapping, macros, regular expressions, ex commands, are left to the users' initiative, together with some vi resource URLs for their own investigation.

After our traditional pizza break (thank you Wai Kong), we commenced on our HTML 101 course, using our new found vi skills! This turned out to be more interesting as people started using their creative skills. Only a couple of the most basic HTML tags were shown, but even with that some of our users came up with some interesting pages! ;-) Of course, some of the advanced users were asking how to change font colors, how to do a hyperlink, etc.

In the mean time, Vortman has been assisting Kui Seong on the installation of RH6.0 on his NEC notebook. All went pretty well, as the networking came up without any glitches. But KS commented that he need to get PPP up also so that he may use his external modem at home for dial-up Internet access.

The two crash courses took us to the evening at about 6pm where everybody was like shagged out (i.e. tired, not in the Austin Power's sense), probably from an overdose of both vi and HTML!

Plans

Now that everybody can use the vi editor ;-), we can actually start doing some configuration work (or maybe even coding)! Especially for those who feel, "hmmm...now that I've got RH6.0 up and running, and X works too...what in the world can I do my machine?"

Now the question is what to configure? There are basic system administration tasks which require hand-editing of files. Furthermore all the popular servers/daemons (e.g. web servers, proxy servers, file servers, etc) require configuration files, and as the other applications which do provide some kind of GUI interface but typically require hand-editing of configuration files for more advanced features; best example is XFree86 (i.e. the X Windowing system).

I propose a basic administration crash course, for the next meeting. Apart from that I won't try to put too much in a session, as it may be too much. As usual, please feel free to suggest any topic to your own interest or liking regarding Linux, and I'll try to accomodate.

Some potential topic(s) for the next gathering:

• Basic System Admininstration

Squidster
Tue Jul 20 10:51:38 MYT 1999

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