[Discuss] The state of VLUG meetings

[John Blomfield]

I have only attended this September's and October's meetings so far, at 
my first meeting there was about 15 and at the second about 6!  
September's presentation I found quite interesting and picked up a few 
new points.  As a long time Fedora user I found listening to the 
experience of users of other distro's informative.  Perhaps a series of 
presenters could give their albiet biased view of the advantages or 
disadvantages of their particular distro love.  I have had virtually no 
contact with other Linux users except through Fedora forums when I have 
had a problem or when searching for answers on the web. I had hoped VLUG 
would provide some contacts with whom I could perhaps discuss common 
items of interest and find out what other users do with Linux besides 
the obvious.

The October meeting was a disappointment since there was nobody from the 
committee to chair the meeting, no agenda and no presentation.  Since it 
was a small group I volunteered to show them the GUI applications I had 
written which I had on my laptop. Unfortunately, there was nobody to 
switch on the display computer so my audience had to look over my 
shoulder at my laptop screen.  I was unprepared to give a presentation 
so I am sure it was less than stellar!  My main area of interest is in 
program development in C and C++ using Qt library but I would be 
particularly interested in any presentation that touched on programming 
with any language or script.  Any insights into dealing with laptop and 
desktop hardware and software issues (I am sure we all have our lists). 
Referring to the earlier comments about Firefox I have been totally 
unable to get the java JRE plugin to work, so any insights in that area 
would be helpful.  I agree that the biggest problem is pitching a 
presentation that is neither too simplistic nor too theoretically 
complex for the audience is a tough call, when the audience is so 
varied.  Perhaps breaking up into specialist groups for the presentation 
is a way to go on some occasions to avoid becoming bland and superficial 
and pleasing nobody.

John Blomfield