April 2002 Meet - Minutes

Hello everybody, glad to be back writing minutes for the BLUG meets. We had an interesting meet this time. Most significant of them was the venue being changed from Fedtech to Ashraya International. The other being this meet was on a Friday instead of the conventional Saturdays.

With HP ISO, Bangalore sponsering the meet, no body had to pay any thing. As usual, we started late by an hour at 6:30pm. Mahendra opened by saying that some of the voulenteers of LB/2001 had still not collected their coupons.

He rolled to the flavour of the Month "Running Windows applications on Linux".

As per schedule, Kingsly started with a very formal nice presentation on Wine, its history, purpose, how to get it and finally how to configure it. He demonstarted wine's capabilities in two ways With and without windows installed on the computer. Interesting demo, with all the useful applications like notepad and other stuff was shown to run comfortably on wine. He then showed how easy it was to configure and run wine on systems with out  windows installed on it.

The next presentation was by our Good Old Atul, he kind of continued from Kingly, showing more applications could be reliablely run on Wine. His talk was basically on CrossOver Office. His slides were on Microsoft® Powerpoint® running on wine which appeared no different that it running natively on Windows® platform. Atul showed a very useful tool to configure wine. In fact, he even demonstated the MS Office® installation starting smoothly on wine. Finally, he concluded by saying that wine project has come far enough for compaines to choose to use linux. He signalled the end of the meet for every hungry mouths to run towards food.

The food was excellent this time, which quickly dissappeared. Everybody waited and got themselves a second helping. In all, this was a cool meet. See you all next time...

-Nivedita Deshpande