[GRLUG] GRCC

[Brad Becker]

On Thursday 02 October 2008 15:38:57 Michael Mol wrote:

> I brokered an exchange between a member of this list, the President of
> the Computer Club and the director of Student Activities at GRCC.  The
> list member (Feel free to speak up if you read this...) wanted to set
> up a Linux club at GRCC, and I recommended that they do it as a
> subgroup of the Computer Club.

<raises hand>   that was me :)

I'm a part-time student at GRCC but don't let that fool you, I'm a bit older 
that the typical freshman there.  I've been to just one meeting so far but 
they appear to have a good core group of people that seem open to different 
things.  They're trying to get a website up and running and plan to continue 
the pc clinics.  They had over 20 boxes in need of repair that were brought 
in a few weeks ago.

Meetings are Wed & Thurs, 4 - 6 pm and repair clinics are slated toward month 
end unless affected by holidays.  Side note:  hmmmm, nothing like a nice 
Linux LiveCD in the toolbox!

I was hoping to be further along with this but my profession as an investment 
consultant has had a few challenges lately!  Hopefully within the next 30 
days we can get a subgroup formed but my personal empahsis would be primarily 
geared toward the new or beginning linux user.

As past president of a 900+ member computer society with an active Linux 
special interest group it's been my experience there's a certain perpetuity 
keeping it on a lower skill level as there's always been a greater interest 
in the workstation side of things (aka windoze users looking for a change) 
and ample gui applications to go over.  Frankly, many people are simply 
looking for an excuse to use it and we were happy to oblige.  It's really 
caught that society by storm, aided by the fact that everyone's pissed having 
to load an armada of anti-malware app's, many of which don't work anyway, 
plus the ridiculous hardware demands needed.

Other things we did included linux install fests, look sees at various 
distro's, distributed computing (Boinc, Folding), virtualbox, vmware, gnome 
vs kde vs the others, and a bit of networking.  We had a nice UT and Quake 
server going for quite a while plus a bit of FTP ... nothing fancy.  I also 
learned just how badly I suck at first person shooters.

The skill level here within GRLUG seems pretty extraordinary.  Perhaps in 
proposal to the club we could suggest splitting meetings into 2 parts, the 
first for the newer user and then let you guys have at it with more of the 
advanced stuff that I usually don't understand anyway:)

Will try to make tomorrow's club meeting and try to get the wheels going.

Brad Becker
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