A report of the First meet of the group at Delhi, on 19 Dec 1998 by: Raj Mathur <raju@sgi.com>

The Delhi Linux lovers met at Dilli Haat (in South Delhi) on Saturday the 19th at 12 noon (well, some were there at 12 noon, the rest trickled in upto about 3pm :) The final tally was over 20 people. Girish Panjwani discussed the spread of Linux in Eicher, where it is being used for proxy and e-mail very effectively. Anjali Sinha discussed her sales of Linux solutions in the small-to-medium corporates. Raju Mathur discussed the Linux setup in the Times of India. An unknown gentleman discussed Linux as a Samba server in places like Siachen and in the Armed Forces.

It was decided to try out Lotus Notes Server and Client for Solaris/x86 and/or SCO under iBCS in Linux. Raj Mathur is volunteering to try to get it to work. Alok Sinha has offered to try to get the software. Nishikant Kapoor very generously came with stacks of Linux CD's and old issues of LJ, including RH power Tools, Developer Resource Kit, RH 5.1 and Oracle for Linux, which were snapped up within moments. A large hand to Nishikant please! The CD's and LJ's will go into the Linux physical resource pool once they are returned (see under).

We are making 2 Linux physical resource centers in North and South Delhi. Mits (Rajesh Mittal) will be the focal point for North Delhi. Raju (Mathur) will be the focal point for South Delhi. I'll be posting the contact information and CD's/resources available for both of them in a seperate message. Madhav Pai volunteered to get some coverage for Linux in the Corporate by CNBC. CNBC will first meet Girish of Eicher and get their story. We are also trying to get them to cover TOI and the Army in the same (or another) episode.

A lot of discussion took place on Linux on the desktop. The general consensus seemed to be that Linux wasn't ready for the desktop yet. If resources become available we will try loading SO or Applixware onto a powerful server and see how it behaves with users accessing it over X. Need the server, clients and network in place for that. Most people were willing to devote time unofficially to helping out other Linux users and newbies for free or for a fee. We will be building this into some sort of structured information/resource base once we figure out how to structure it There are also a lot of people who are willing to support Linux commercially. We need suggestions on how to structure this resource, and how to allocate tasks once commercial queries come in. Sudhir Gandotra was confident of being able to get Linux installation and setup assignments on a commercial basis from small to medium companies in the city.

Sudhir Gandotra suggested a 1-page newsletter for the community. Sudhir, can you elaborate a bit more on this in linux-delhi?

Some misguided elements tried to bring up a Windows NT war but were quickly gagged with food and sat upon until they behaved.

Raju Mathur will be making a Linux in Delhi (or in India) success story database on the web. This will serve as a resource for anyone wanting to advocate Linux in a corporate environment.

The next meeting will take place on the 16th of Jan, 1999 as a to-be-determined venue. Raju Mathur will be convening. Alok Sinha has offered his office and we will use that if it is sufficient to handle the huge crowds we are expecting. We will be having tutorials on Linux Networking, including one or more of DNS, Sendmail, Apache, Samba, Routing. Suggestions and volunteers welcome. ILUG-Delhi is to be registered in the LUG database(s). We are debating whether to use web space under the ILUG page or seperately. Enough people have offered free web space to the ILUG-Delhi page. Thanks! The meeting then departed en masse in the general direction of Bata-Vada, Sabudana-Vada, Pao-Bhaji, Fried Mumus, Thukpa and Khandvi. I hope I haven't missed anything out. Happy Linux'ing. -- Raju

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