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from 1 Saturday, December 13, 1997
Special thanks to Masaori 'Smiley' Omote For This Video!
The December, 1997 meeting of the Tokyo Linux Users Group (TLUG) was a raging success, and thanks are due again to HSBC, and to Joe Marchak in particular, for their continued generosity in allowing TLUG to use their facilities.
There were about 27 people at the meeting, including three women, and 8 Japanese. Also of interest were Karl-Max from Germany (who lives in Germany) and Nick from the Ukraine (who may live in Japan now).
For this meeting we had lots of “freebies” to give away and many members turned out early to help with the set up and preparation. At twelve-thirty we made out way to the central Yaesu wicket at Tokyo station to meet with everyone arriving for the pre-meeting lunch. Craig kept the locals amused with a Linux sticker held aloft. It worked very well though, and several new members were attracted by the whacky antics of our leader.
From the station, we wandered across the road and crammed into the upstairs section of a Chinese restaurant for a very satisfying lunch. Despite the wierd looking bunch at the top table, I don't think we frightened too many other customers away. The good looking, young crowd sat at a second table. Included in this group was our newest (and hungriest) member, the hansome young Yuri.
After lunch we picked up several more members at Starbucks coffee shop, before moving on to the meeting proper at HSBC. After introductions, the afternoon turned out to be even more hectic than the morning had been, with lots of good information being exchanged. Of especial interest was Jim Tittsler's demonstration of “Xcopilot”, the Unix development environment for the U.S. Robotics Palm Pilot. Another notable achievement was the successful configuration of NIS on the machine “sparky” by Alberto Tomita.
Dmytro Kovalev and his son Yuri won for smallest Linux machine. They had it running on an IBM palmtop, complete with X windows.
David Riley had to take a plane to get to the meeting. He's one of the guys in a pony-tail sitting next to Craig in the Chinese restaurant picture.
Frank O' Carrol has 64 processors hooked up with gigabyte hardware and BSD. Maybe one day, it will churn Linux. :-) Frank agreed to give a talk on high-performance super-computing in the future.
Gaspar Sinai probably had the second fastest box with his 600mhz Alpha machine. He gave a demonstration of Yudit unicode editor.
Two of the new members, Ayako Kato and Yohko Kase, are working at a company that sells fully configured Linux servers for intranet/Internet use and supports them. Amazing. Check out their web page at http://www.10art-ni.co.jp ; their company is very Java and very Linux oriented
This meeting was notable for several reasons; we attracted several new members; several of the new members were attractive and, not least, we had a much larger contingent of Japanese members, too. Thanks to Craig and Ken Harada for their efforts to bolster the membership.
Finally, we'd like to say a special thank you to Alberto Tomita, who turned up early, with his car, at John Little's office and moved all of the equipment across town to Joe's place in preparation for the meeting. Thanks Alberto!
Thoughts about the next meeting
Should TLUG set up a real agenda at the meeting and have a real lecture-style presentation for at least 30 minutes of the meeting? Should we designate an area as a novice area where an experienced Linux member explains things like UNIX/Linux system/network administration, TCP/IP routing, or maybe even basics of Apache performance tuning, SQL database, or maybe even intermediate emacs usage?
Or, maybe we could have parallel sessions of novice and intermediate. If we get over 30 people at the next meeting, there is going to be a wide range of Linux knowledge and probably a wealth of information exchange possible. 1997:12 12