1997
November
November 97 witnessed Richard Rowe and
John "Kate" Looney seperately
suggesting the beginnings of the Irish Linux Users' Group on COLA.
December
The initial website was generously hosted by the Computer Society of University Limerick as http://ilug.csn.ul.ie since
December of '97.
1998
February
The ILUG had it's
first meeting, or Face to/2 Face as they came to be called, on the seventh
of February in University Limerick.
June
The second meeting, in Trinity College,
Dublin, on the 6th of June left a pernament mark in the history of the Irish
Linux Users' Group - the acquisition of the linux.ie domain name, hence the
website of the ILUG being at www.linux.ie and
some people, selected on a merit basis, being awarded with @linux.ie email
addresses.
August
The third Face 2 Face of the Irish Linux
Users' Group was held on the 22nd of August, nine days after people
started thinking of a bulk subscription to the Linux Journal.
The website was redesigned, and included a new logo with Tux and a shamrock on
his tummy.
September
Owen Kelly's "Beginners Linux
Guide" was moved to the ILUG website, and made available under the URL of
http://www.linux.ie/beginners-linux-guide/
October
The first recorded use
of POTD (Pub Of The Day) can be attributed to Hugh Dowling in an email posted
on the 5th of October, it was for a POTD in Copperface Jacks, Dublin, meeting
the chairman of the Danish LUG.
November
The Irish Linux Users' Group was invited en masse to the
Intersocs Conference which was held at NUI Galway during November, at which Alan Cox was a special guest.
Kenn Humbourg gave a talk on
setting up
Linux as an Internet Gateway, which was followed up with Joe Desbonnet
chatting about setting up Apache, and later with
a talk on HTML tricks by
Ken Guest.
Owen Kelly was interviewed on
TechTV for a feature about alternative operating systems to Windows.
Ivan Griffin's LWR (Linux WWW Resources)
moved to www.linux.ie.
December
At the Irish Linux Users' Group POTD on the 18th of December in
Piseogs on Camden Street a rather apt song was played: "I Want To Break Free",
by Queen.
This of course relating to the free software movement, and has nothing to
do with dressing up in drag.
1999
February
Two InstallFests occurred during the month of February -
Kevin Lyda hosted one at his home
in Ranelagh, Dublin and another was hosted in the Waterford Institute for
Technology a week later on the 27th, which was organised by
Bernard Tyers.
February saw Colm Buckley's linux box, upon which the ILUG website and mailing
lists are hosted, being moved to a webfarm in
Indigo and the start of the ILUG Quotes page.
March
During March the Irish Linux Users' Group website was redesigned, most
noticeable of this redesign was a slight color change of the logo (the text
changed from blue to green), which also became a link back to the main page,
and a sidebar on the left side of each page for easy navigation.
April
The fourth Face 2 Face was held in
University Limerick on the 24th of April, five days later on the
29th the Irish Unix Users' Group donated a sum of money to the
Irish Linux Users' Group.
May
"Lugh", Colm Buckley's linux box generously 'webfarmed' at no expense in
Indigo, became the "main edit point" for the
www.linux.ie website on the 5th of May, with
ilug.csn.ul.ie (aka
www2.linux.ie) now being a mirror of the
site instead of vice versa.
June.
A search engine was added to the website
on the third.
A number of meetings were held in Cork, specific to the
Cork Linux Users' Group, arranged by
Donncha O'Caoimh.
July.
The cork.linux.ie website went live on the
20th which, coincidentally, was the same day that people interested
in a Belfast LUG were asked to email Danny Walker about meeting up sometime.
July also saw the start of a new section, called
Tux's Travels, a gallery of photos (given in
evidence B^) of Tux's antics.
The mailinglist page got redesigned to include a form to let members get to
their subscription/options page effortlessly and a portion of the main page got
redesigned as the list of links to mailinglist archives grew increasingly long.
August.
August was a mostly a quiet month (probably because the main troublemakers
left to go to the Chaos Computer Club's "Chaos Communications Camp" in Germany
B^).
A few things did happen though, the main news script got updated by Ken Guest
so that people could embed ILUG News into their own websites and "link badges", designed by Rob Hill and
Ken Guest, were made available.
The "Irish Computer" magazine ran a few articles about Linux called "The
penguin that soared" and "Linux takes root in Ireland".
The website adopted a copyright notice
September.
Almost as if to make up for the quietness of August, quite a number of things
occurred in September.
One of them was both really rather inevitable and yet unwanted by most
members: The ILUG got a constitution.
A tips forum got added to the website, giving it a
much needed level of interactivity.
A 'Nokia friendly' section was also added to the
website.
This section, for the most part, contains portions of the main page of the
website [most notably the news sections and the Social Events Calendar] broken
down into smaller pages for easy reading on members Nokia Communicators and
other PDAs.
To top it all off polling forms were added to the ILUG
Tutorials so that the people writing the tutorials can get feedback on what
the consensus is on their work.
October.
A guide to the 'Irish Linux Users' Group' was printed in the Irish periodical
"ComputerScope" (written by Grainne Rothery with assistance and information
provided by apparantly self-appointed Public Relations Officer
Owen Kelly [this was later
cleared up as a miscommunication between the two]).
Mostly favourable, the guide cast a psychotic light on members of the ILUG as
overstated references to disturbing penguin toting occurred in this Guide all
too often for comfort, making the ILUG sound like something out of a Monty
Python sketch ("We are the knights who say 'Tux'"), or a very weird Tarantino
or Hitchcock film.
Raph Levien,
libart developer and Gimp module hacker, answered a host of interview style
questions. His answers (and the questions of course) were cunningly enough
transformed and published on the website as
"An Interview with Raph Levien".
A list of hardware vendors recommended by
ILUG members and updated connection scripts
and other such information appeared on the website during this month, as
did 'printer friendly' versions of the ILUG Tutorials
, BLG Articles and of this timeline;
powered by a script written by Ken
Guest.
October also saw the Nokia friendly section of the
website fleshed out futher with newsfeeds from both
Linux Today and
Slashdot.
November.
November was quite a month. Kickstarted with the brilliantly organised Linux Awareness in Ireland Day (LAID for short) in UCC, November saw in more ILUG interviews (with kernel hacker Andrea Arcangeli and our own Caolan McNamara of MSWordview/wvware fame), a number of articles were reproduced from the Irish printed media and a number of reviews of various Linux distributions were written for linux.ie by Kevin Lyda.
The Who's Who page finally got livened up a bit with photos of some of the ILUG members - not a bad idea when trying to put names (or emails) to faces.
Later in the month the beautifully taken photographs of LAID were published on the main website, with a specially scripted slideshow program written by Ken Guest for presenting them. The photographs themselves were taken by Con Conner.
It is only fair to mention that there wouldn't have been a LAID if it wasn't for the hard work and dedication of Donncha O'Caoimh, Owen Kelly and other members of the Cork Linux Users' Group.
December
During December at a meeting in Trinity it was decided that regular ILUG meetings would be held in Dublin (details at http://www.linux.ie/DublinMeetings.html).
ILUG members were asked to translate the Mandrake Linux install strings into Irish - a task at which some rose to the challenge, the results of which are present at http://www.linux.ie/projects/mandrake-ga.
Not much else happened during December.
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