Tag Archives: VTLUUG

Hey everybody!

I recently attended my second VTLUUG meeting. This meeting was actually very interesting and relevant to what we’ve been doing in class as we talked about the different LINUX distributions that have been released such as Fedora, Arch Linux  and Linux Mint and the advantages and disadvantages of some of these distributions over others. After using Ubuntu for one semester, I feel I’m fairly comfortable with the UI and might consider the possibility of migrating to a more developer/programmer friendly LINUX distribution such as Arch Linux which is targeted for more experienced LINUX users as I think it might possibly prove to be useful for the Applied Software Design class I’m scheduled to take next semester.

Going back to the topic of the VT LUUG meeting, this meeting was very participative with multiple people from the audience providing their input on the various distributions unlike the last meeting where the President and Vice-President seemed to be doing all the talking. After talking about the various LINUX distributions, we essentially talked about upcoming and noteworthy news in the UNIX/LINUX world. Another repeating observation that I made at this meeting was that a lot of the material that was discussed in the meeting was beyond the scope of our ECE 2524: Intro to Unix class and it might be better if VTLUUG was divided up into smaller groups based on the proficiency of the users and their past experience. In conclusion, the VTLUUG meetings were very informative and thorough with upcoming news and events in the LINUX/UNIX world but almost every member has a vast amount of experience and seems proficient with the environment so it is difficult to follow along sometimes.

Until next time!

Hello everybody!

I just attended my first VTLUUG meeting and it was nothing like what I expected. From their website, the Linux and Unix Users Group at Virginia Tech (VTLUUG or “the LUUG”) is dedicated to improving the computing skills of its members, supporting Linux and Unix use on campus, and serving the community through Free Software and open data. The first meeting was especially interesting because I felt a lot of the members were regulars and very experience with UNIX/LINUX based operating systems.

At this meeting, we talked about a simulation game that was developed in a UNIX environment similar to one of the primitive handheld console games. To be quite honest, I really felt that almost everyone in the audience who was participating in the discussion of the game was very experienced with UNIX and I couldn’t follow along in some of the subtopics of the discussion. The people who were speaking about the game did go into a fair amount of technical detail but there was an atmosphere of mutual respect and inquisitiveness all around.

One of the trends I seemed to notice at the meeting was that the same key people kept presenting new ideas and talking about developments in the world on UNIX/LINUX. A suggestion that I would encourage to be implemented is encouraged participation of some of the newer members of the organization, especially students who attend the meetings to get credit for the Intro to Unix class. This would encourage an increased level of learning and curiosity which I think would be very beneficial. It was a great experience from an overall perspective though.

Until next time!