Minutes for the Feb 2002 BLUG meet

Date : 23-02-2002

Although there was alacrity in the air,by the time everybody made it to the rendezvous & settled down it was 6.30.pm. Mahendra had an optimistic cheer saying that we were breaking the pervious records.I mean we were quite a bit early than the previous "latest start times".

He always has good news for the crowd there. Last time it was the goody vouchers & this time he made anouncements that this time the BIG event ( I mean the Linux Bangalore/2002 ) was being scheduled for 9th,10th & 11th of December 2002. Yeahhhhhh!

As a part of efforts, to better the quality of the talks for LB/2002, now on there will be a "Theme of the Month". There will be talks + demos by the adepts in those particular fields....cool na? Hey btw we are starting off with 'Clustering'. So on the whole i guess the meets in the comming months will be 'Not to miss' kinds. So folks hope to see more of you there!! :)

There was also a discussion on "Corporate Involvement" in the BLUG activities. The general plan was to invite corporates to BLUG meets when we had a theme for the meet.

Yeah, then the talks started off, we had 3 talks scheduled.

1. Introduction to Symmetric Multiprocessing (from a kernel programmers perspective) - Ravikiran G Thirumalai
2. Filesystems in Linux - Balaji
3. Configuring Oracle 9i in RedHat Linux - Surjo Das

RaviKiran started of with clear description of multiprocessor model & then came on to various issues on kernel level dealing with Symmetric Multiprocessing. All features quite in depth, with example program codes.There were details of implementing Semaphores & spinlock.This talk lasted for a kinda long time & then we had a Q&A session, which eventually lead to a 'race condition' on the spinlock implementation & release lock....issues between Hanish & Ravikiran. oops! it was more than an hour by then, so a quick wrap up. Paved way for the next talk..to sum up, the talk was informative & good .

Balaji started his part by delving into the history & evolution of the different File systems. Then we had a quicky on the Basic Principles plus stuff on Superblocks, Inodes, Device links etc.. Virtual FS were then discussed. Hey i personally liked this liner that Balaji used to intro this subtopic -

The talk by Surjo Das was Configuring Oracle 9i in RedHat Linux . It was a neat & detailed talked with good amounts of usefull do's & dont's. He guided us with tackling the 'binutils' problem. Basically we learnt that Downgrading helps. Kick off that problem. Followed by HOWTOs on starting & shutting down. Then he talked a bit on Circumventing installation on AMD. Surjo Das also suggests dbspecialist.com for help.

hey folks thats about it.. the talks finished..& it was time for snacks..we all hung around there for sometime.. & then packed up for the day.

One thing i cant just forget to say is that without Atul & Biju,the place lacked some kinda charm.

The BLUG would like to thank Federal Technologies for letting us use their office for our meetings.

until next time signin off folks...

Nivedita Deshpande