Maldivian Linux User Group

I've just returned from the first MLUG meeting in over 4 years. Except for some new faces I did not recognize, the core Linux Users haven't changed at all. Chops is still the driving force, and his enthusisasm for Linux hasn't waned. [Hey Chops: does Mai still have the penguin?]

The meeting was entertaining, and informative (I learnt about a company called Linspire that is being persecuted by a company called Microsoft), but I've outgrown my enthusiasm for Linux, having moved on to other interests: mainly Lisp, and Smalltalk.

As an aside, I recently installed Fedora Core 2, using freshly burned CDs, on my PIII Celeron laptop. I had been using XP comfortably on it, but I wanted to see where Linux has gotten to since I last used it. The install took over 6 hours: perhaps something wrong with my CD-ROM drive. Using Gnome or KDE on it was painfully slow, and I switched over to WindowMaker. When I installed CMUCL, it dumped core each time I tried to run it (turned out the Fedora people had changed the memory mapping of executables.) I did manage to get it working, but it was annoying, as I had no such problems on my FreeBSD machine at work. In the end, I got tired of the slooooooowness and the lack of automatic power management facilities, and installed XP again. During the XP install, the CD-ROM drive worked just fine :)

Anyways, I am a happy Windows user now, and do not qualify to be part of MLUG: but I do wish MLUG all the best with their endeavours.