The Washington, D.C. Linux Users Group (DC LUG) was formed by Przemek Klosowski and a group of Linux enthusiasts in July 1994. Since then the group has kept a lively schedule of meetings, with talks by Linux developers and explorers. Meetings typically run about two hours and feature one or two talks plus a discussion period. This page is restored from the 1998-99 DC LUG home page.
About DC LUG
In May 1996 the group set up its own web server, sponsored by Erol's Internet Services, shared with other volunteer organisations and set up as an FTP site for Linux-related material. That server is the machine this archive restores. Members use Linux in every role imaginable, for pleasure and for business, and the group has always been happy to help newcomers get started.
Meetings
Meetings usually took place at the National Institutes of Health campus in Bethesda, Maryland, in the Lipsett auditorium in the main hospital building (Building 10). The usual time was 7 pm on the third Wednesday of each month.
In 1998, meetings were held on September 16, October 21, November 18 and December 16.
InstallFests
DC LUG and LUGMAN held Linux InstallFests three or four times a year, where people could bring a machine and leave with Linux installed and running, for free. The last general installfest of the era happened on August 22, 1998, in Falls Church, Virginia. LUGMAN also held mini-installfests on request at its monthly meetings in Centreville, Virginia. See the InstallFests page for the full story.
DC LUG Mirror, News & Mailing List
- Local mirror
- The group's local mirror was a great place to find the latest sources. Why wait to get the bits all the way from Helsinki when they were in stock here? See Mirrors & Archives.
- Local news
- The DC-area Linux users newsgroup was
dc.org.linux-users. - Mailing list
- To join, members sent mail to
[email protected]with the word subscribe in both the subject and the body. Posts went to[email protected].
Other Linux Links
World Wide Web: the Linux Home Page (linux.org), Linux at the Sunsite archives, the Linux Documentation Project (LDP), and the Walnut Creek Linux archive.
Usenet news: comp.os.linux.admin, comp.os.linux.announce, comp.os.linux.development, comp.os.linux.hardware and comp.os.linux.help.
Past Meeting Topics
A remarkable run of talks passed through these meetings, including a who's who of early Linux. The record below is restored as it was kept on the DC LUG page.
Wednesday, July 6, 1994
Initial organisational meeting.
Wednesday, August 3, 1994
"Introduction to X on Linux" by Przemek Klosowski. "Linux Networking" by Don Becker.
Wednesday, September 14, 1994
"Running SCO (iBCS2) applications under Linux" by Eric Youngdale. "New floppy driver" by Dave Niemi.
Wednesday, October 12, 1994
"Sound drivers in Linux" by J. Hurwitz. "Latest trends in Intel-compatible hardware" by Hsin Yen (InteliSys).
Wednesday, November 2, 1994
"Shared libraries in Linux" by Eric Youngdale. "Literate programming tools under Linux" by Przemek Klosowski.
Thursday, December 1, 1994
"Wine: MS Windows programs run under Linux" by Bob Amstadt. "Update on the Beowulf project" by Don Becker.
Wednesday, January 11, 1995
"HTML 3.0, or how to write your own Mosaic home page" by Sean Kane.
Wednesday, February 15, 1995
"The FSSTND file system naming standard" by Dave Niemi. "Confessions of a Linux pessimist: making backups, emergency boot disks, and so on" by Przemek Klosowski.
Wednesday, March 1, 1995
"XFree86, release 3.1.1" by one of the XFree authors, Dirk H. Hohndel.
Wednesday, April 19, 1995
"Expect / Tcl / Tk" by Don Libes.
Tuesday, May 9, 1995
"Linus talks about what he is interested in" by Linus Torvalds.
Wednesday, June 7, 1995
"Linux services for Macintosh and Windows users" by Rob Newberry.
Wednesday, July 5, 1995
"A few facts about ISDN" by David Lesher.
Wednesday, August 2, 1995
"Introduction to the Perl language" by Kurt Reisler.
Wednesday, September 27, 1995
"Caldera Network Desktop" by Caldera's director of technical marketing, Nicholas Wells.
Wednesday, October 18, 1995
"Adventures with Linux in the real world" by David E. Storey.
Wednesday, November 15, 1995
"Linux kernel loadable modules" by Michael K. Johnson, during the FedUnix / Open Systems World conference.
Wednesday, December 20, 1995
"An Introduction to the Python Programming Language, With a Detour to the Grail Browser" by Python's author, Guido van Rossum.
Wednesday, January 17, 1996
"Linux on Alpha" by Bob Segrest from Digital Equipment Corporation, with on-line transparencies on Alpha, embedded and real-time Linux.
Wednesday, February 21, 1996
"MD driver and other current kernel issues" by Dave Niemi. The MD driver let one treat multiple disk drives as a single large partition, the beginning of a RAID implementation for Linux.
Wednesday, March 20, 1996
"Java language and programming Java for WWW applications" by Anil Hemrajani.
Wednesday, April 17, 1996
"Programmable hardware: running PLDShell on Linux" by Przemek Klosowski.
Wednesday, May 15, 1996
"Word processing under Linux" by Peter Teuben.
Wednesday, July 17 and August 21, 1996
Discussion and preparation for the coming Configurefest (July 27) and Installfest (August 24): "XFree server configuration" and "RPM package management" by Przemek Klosowski, and "Why you should buy an Ethernet card, and where" by David Lesher.
Wednesday, October 16, 1996
Joint meeting with DC-SAGE: Brad Knowles, comp.mail.sendmail FAQ maintainer, on "Sendmail Overview for Experienced Unix Administrators".
Wednesday, November 6, 1996
DC LUG meeting during the OSW conference, with earlier Linux conference sessions.
Wednesday, December 18, 1996
"Free Software Business Models" by Jim Kingdon of Cyclic Software.
Wednesday, January 15, 1997
"Setting up a Full-Service Low-Cost Network" by David Niemi.
Wednesday, February 19, 1997
Discussion of the internet service provider tax and using removable media (in short, the 'user' option in /etc/fstab).
Wednesday, March 19, 1997
Jon Lasser presented the Mutt mail user agent, and David Lesher discussed the new AT&T wireless local loop telephone service.
Wednesday, May 21, 1997
The group watched video of Linus Torvalds' talk at the December USENIX. The recording quality was rather poor.
Wednesday, June 18, 1997
Lessons from the installfest.
Wednesday, July 16, 1997
Booting Linux: LILO, initrd, module versions, the cylinder 1024 problem, and more.
Wednesday, August 20, 1997
The Inferno distributed operating system project from Lucent Technologies.
Wednesday, September 17, 1997
A cooperative scheme for faster IP access using a mix of ISDN and other protocols, by CICAT Inc. of Fairfax.
Wednesday, October 15, 1997
Laureen Hall of the Software Publishers Association on "Privacy, Security and the Internet: The Growing Use of Encryption".
Wednesday, November 19, 1997
How to store a whole CD collection on a single hard drive: digital audio extraction (CDDA) and MPEG-3 sound compression.
Wednesday, December 3, 1997
Bob Young of Red Hat Software on the new Red Hat 5.0 distribution and Linux in the commercial world.
Wednesday, January 21, 1998
Discussion of the installfest, and a visit to the LoBoS cluster, a distributed computer for molecular biology calculations built on Linux.
Wednesday, February 18, 1998
Questions and answers meeting.
Thursday, March 19, 1998
Met at the University of Maryland. Red Hat's Eric Troan discussed plans for the future and other current Linux topics.
Wednesday, April 15, 1998
Paul Everitt, VP for Product Development at Digital Creations, demonstrated the Python scripting language, especially as applied to web scripting.
Wednesday, May 20, 1998
Dr. Benjamin Bederson presented his work on Zoomable User Interfaces (ZUIs), implemented in his Tcl extension Pad++.
Wednesday, June 17, 1998
Roldan Pozo talked about his Jazznet Linux cluster at NIST and the numerical mathematics work he ran on it.
Wednesday, July 15, 1998
A chat about window managers and recent Linux developments, including the upcoming Virginia 5.2 beta installfest.
Wednesday, August 19, 1998
Maxwell Spangler talked about his favourite window managers; the group discussed the August 22 Virginia installfest; and Antoni Dabek reported on Linux activities in Poland.
Wednesday, September 16, 1998
Justin Maurer talked about the GNOME desktop.
Wednesday, October 21, 1998
Kevin Kitts talked about the Oracle database on Linux.
DC LUG Contacts
If you wanted to speak about Linux at a meeting, or had an addition or comment for the DC Linux home page, you were welcome to get in touch. The meeting coordinator was Przemek Klosowski, and the DC LUG page was maintained by David Niemi.
1998 DC Linux Users Group home page, restored from http://www.tux.org/dclinux/.