TLUG Meeting January 2005 

TLUG Meeting January 2005

Originally posted on Sunday, January 16, 2005

Today (rather yesterday as it is already Sunday...) marked my first aquaintance with the Tokyo Linux Users Group pr TLUG in person. I have been in touch with the group previously in the past 3 weeks as a passive email list reader and this is the first time for me to meet the guys behind the group in this years's first TLUG meeting..

It was a really nice event and it had been an eyeopener for me knowing that there are a lot of things out there that I have not encountered or heard of. I expect myself to continue to take part in the TLUG meetings and learn more about Linux and the applications that runs on it and this month's meeting focused on two main topics: Knoppix and Squeak.

Knoppix is a Linux image on a CD and is a fully functionaly OS with applications like OpenOffice and gimp imcluded - all in a 700 MB CD. A really nice application is that one can you Knoppix as a rescue disc in the event that a server or workstation has crashed. I hope to try out Knoppix in the coming days.

Find more info about Knoppix here

Squeak is a Smalltal-80 implementation and is a cool platform to teach children about computers other than the usual Microsoft applications. I don't know Squeak enough to give much useful info so I'll just refer you to the site. Other information about using Squeak to as an educational can be found here. If any of you is interested in learning how to use Squeak as an educational tool for children I can refer you to Alain Hoang (our presentor for Squeak today) for more info.

After the technical meeting was a nice 6-hour social cum dinner evert at a local Izakaya (居酒屋）. There were traditional Japanese Izakaya food which I failed to take pictures or names of, karaoke, and of course lots of beer.

I managed to take some pictures of the group while at the local Izakaya (居酒屋）:







There were about 25 people at the meeting and 14 joined the drinks at the Izakaya. The meeting was great and it next meeting. Many of the attendees have spent much time tweaking all sorts of Linux-related apps or distros and more than ever, I am motivated to try these out myself. I hope this will be the year that I really spend time learning all these stuffs.

Among the stuffs I would want to master some scripting language (perhaps php or python, or both! and also perhaps zebra (the router OS, since I would want to learn more about routing protocol behaviors.

PHP: http://www.php.net
Python: http://www.python.org
Zebra: http://www.zebra.org