On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 12:40:00PM +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:

On Friday 02 March 2007 12:36, Ian bell wrote:

...

I have just about every Linux Format DVD from LXF20 (sometime in 2001). As I am soon to move house I want to dispose of them. Might be useful if someone wants an old distro.

Happy to bring them to the next kit meet or look out any special requirements. Otherwise I'll skip them.

Or they could go in the ALUG library? (If there is space?)

When I ran the library it was chock full of old distros that nobody ever wanted. I'm not sure if I ditched them in the end or handed them on to Wayne. Unless any of the DVD's have anything of great interest on them other than old distros then i'd ditch them, purely on the basis that most ancient distros are still available on many mirror sites. For example you have ftp://archive.download.redhat.com/pub/redhat/linux/ and http://archive.debian.org/ i'm guessing most other distros will have the same. Adam -- jabberid = quinophex@jabber.earth.li

Just to add, I asked Wayne about this sort of thing in a conversation recently and he did say that, unless their was a special reason for their inclusion, he'd stopped holding onto magazines and cds, because they got out of date so quickly. You're only other option would be to stick them on ebay for the price of postage and see if anyone was desperately looking for them ... Sam.

On Fri, Mar 02, 2007 at 06:51:19PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:

Yes I think I have decided that what with the prevalence of broadband now the value of these Magazine coverdiscs is dubious when they are new let alone when they are 6 months + old. Pretty much the same is true for the Magazines IMHO, once they are 6 months old 80% of the content is completely irrelevant.

Didn't we have an alug cd burning group some time ago where a group of people with broadband+burners would send disks to needy users? Or am I thinking of another lug? If not, then I can burn+post discs for people on an occaisional basis (don't want to spend a fortune on media+postage obviously) or between the aluggers we could arrange for pick ups at lug meets if people who required discs asked well in advance. Adam -- jabberid = quinophex@jabber.earth.li

On 02/03/07, Ian bell <ianbell@ukfsn.org> wrote:

Adam Bower wrote:

...

Didn't we have an alug cd burning group some time ago where a group of people with broadband+burners would send disks to needy users? Or am I thinking of another lug? If not, then I can burn+post discs for people on an occaisional basis (don't want to spend a fortune on media+postage obviously) or between the aluggers we could arrange for pick ups at lug meets if people who required discs asked well in advance.

Adam

I can too. I have a USB hard drive with a bunch of distros on it.

Ian

I'm not actually sure how much need there is for this kind of service these days, what with the proliferation of broadband of late. Perhaps it's worth putting a page on the wiki offering this, and if anyone needs it, ask them to post their request to this list. Then anyone can volunteer to burn and take along to the next meet? I'm away for the next couple of days, but I can knock up a note about it when I get back if people want. Needs a reasonably prominent note on the front page but should be easy to achieve. Peter.

I really think that what the wiki needs is less on the front page and more content in general; most of the discussion has appeared to be about style and there's hasn't been a huge amount of user added content.

J.

The style thing has been pretty much done - the front page is important to make sure that visitors can easily see what information is available on the site and navigate it. This was one of the fundamental problems of the old site, IMHO. I think we've got that now. The content is building up - there's already a lot more content on there than most LUGs and possibly even the old site. Give it some time ... I hope to work on the Help guides when I get back towards the end of this week. I actually think it's remarkable how far we've come since the wiki was launched. On a related topic, I noticed you've spent some time on the front page, moving some stuff into separate pages. That's all good - but I wondered about the Links page you've added. The links to FSF/GNU/Linux you removed from the front-page were meant to be informative, but not that important. If you think they clutter the front page, happy to get rid of them ... I'm not sure they actually warrant their own page - I don't think a general Links page is likely to get many visitors and might just end up stagnating or being filled with lots of unrelated links. Anyway, I just thought I'd say that if you'd moved them because you didn't want to delete them (because someone else - me - had contributed the content), then I have no problem dumping them altogether ... Or maybe I'm wrong and people think a Links page would be useful ... ? What do you think? Peter.

On 05/03/07, Brett Parker <iDunno@sommitrealweird.co.uk> wrote:

I think we've got a hard to maintain, overly complicated front page that's trying to impress (and, IMO, failing).

Assuming you're not talking about the wiki engine but are referring instead to the actual wiki-code of the front page, I wouldn't argue that the syntax looks horrible, but that's specific to MoinMoin. If you'd like to work on it, I'd love to see one or more alternative proposals that we could all choose from. I think if you want to remove all the layout stuff which is what makes it so complex, you'll essentially be left with the very basic formatted text look as it was when Jonathan installed it. I think that'd be a step backward, but maybe you can arrange a user-friendly front page out of that where I failed ... I am totally new to MoinMoin after all. I assume the front page will also need looking at again, if and when someone gets round to trying out a new wiki theme, so revisiting it then may also reduce the code's complexity if some of the content moves out into the theme (though I think we should keep the changable content, like the next meeting dates, in the main page, so we can all easily update it).

A reasonable set of links to outside documentation is always good, there's a lot of useful information out there, and as far as possible we shouldn't duplicate it but instead link to it. If people find something useful (for example: http://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-scripts.html), could also be useful to add links to the "major" projects that we all use - such as openoffice.org, gnome, kde, etc

Obviously linking out in pages where it's relevant is required - your shell scripts example has, therefore, been linked from the TipsTricksAndWorkarounds page. The question I raised was about whether a generic Links page was really necessary ... You're right we could add links to the major projects, I'm just not sure how useful that is ... still, it sounds like there's quite a few other people who think there's a purpose to it, so that's good enough for me. I only mentioned it in case it had been created by Jonathan just to avoid deleting outright the small number of links that were on the front page.

- just because we *can* reinvent the wheel doesn't mean that we should.

Not sure I understand this bit, tho! ... what are we re-inventing? TTFN, Peter.

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 11:37:22AM +0000, samwise wrote:

On a related topic, I noticed you've spent some time on the front page, moving some stuff into separate pages. That's all good - but I wondered about the Links page you've added. The links to FSF/GNU/Linux you removed from the front-page were meant to be informative, but not that important. If you think they clutter the front page, happy to get rid of them ... I'm not sure they actually warrant their own page - I don't think a general Links page is likely to get many visitors and might just end up stagnating or being filled with lots of unrelated links.

Maybe not a general links page but a page dedicated to links to FSF/GNU/Linux seems a good idea to me. Maybe with, in addition, links to the major distributions. I.e. it's a place to go to "find out about Linux". -- Chris Green

Sorry, but I disagree. It's a generic wiki style and there's no ALUG navigation on most pages. The first few links are the front page, searches, Login, RecentChanges, advanced search, wiki help, front page again, editor, metadata, attachments, more actions and then you finally hit ALUG content. Without CSS, the ALUG content is even barely 'above the fold' for me.

As a minimum, I think the wiki-navigation should move to the end or a side, ALUG-navigation move up the page and reduce the number of fonts and colours. As a maximum, let's do most stuff from useit.com.

No need to apologise MJ, but I think we may possibly have a crossed wire, there. I don't think anyone would disagree that the default MoinMoin wiki doesn't look great. We discussed this in the "Alug Wiki Theme" thread last month. Unfortunately, applying a new one will require someone who has admin access to the website to find the time to play which hasn't happened yet. Rob P has solicited some opinions on other wiki themes and I'm sure someone will - at some point - work on that, simplifying the look and adding things like a consistent menu. Meantime, I was referring solely to the wiki content of the front page which is something we all have access to and can be getting on with, as it will be automatically reformatted when a new theme is applied. I think once we've settled on a new theme, the front page can be modified again to make sure we aren't duplicating links and to make sure it fits in with the rest of the theme.

I'll do some recoding when I get time, but that's at least a week away. Probably longer. Which is why I asked others to adopt www.alug.

That would be cool ... with a decent wiki it should be easy to separate the maintenance of the site's style from those of you with admin, and the content which the rest of us can be working on. So, meantime, I'll continue trying to find time to add some original content. Hopefully, others will as well.

In general, I think Links would be best in amongst other pages, not in a Ghetto page unless you want to build a ODP-style directory.

Yep, that was my feeling too but it sounds like there are others who think it might be of benefit. I guess we run with it - and if it doesn't look like it's collecting much useful content later down the line, we can always talk about it again ... Peter. P.S. Yep, I'm back from my travels to and from the other side of the country ... when, oh, when will we get free net access on trains. Surely the ridiculous cost of tickets covers that by now ;)

On 3/2/07, Wayne Stallwood <ALUGlist@digimatic.co.uk> wrote:

The one slight issue is that when I first set it up I went to great lengths to remove the required field address entry on the sign up pages of opendb and now I want it I cannot find the bodgery that achieved that..quips about cowboys who don't bother commenting the code or keeping a virgin version will be accepted humbly. When I get time I will take another look (or perhaps run a diff on the original opendb code if the same version is sill available for download)

You mean you didn't squirrel away the code into a version control system before you started? ;-) I'm sure it won't be long before something like MacOS's timemachine become more popular. Regards, Tim.