FreeBSD UK User Group

In order to celebrate FreeBSD's tenth birthday, a number of members met up in Cardiff. This was mainly a social event with a large amount of technical talk.

The day consisted of three main parts, the talks, some business announcements and the traditional beer+curry.

We hosted a mini conference this time, with 3 guest speakers (all UK FreeBSD committers). Over 40 people attended the meeting which lasted all day.

The conference room hire for the full day was far too expensive for the UK user Group, so FreeBSD Services Ltd paid the entire bill. I hope other companies may like to offer this sponsorship in the future.

Paul Richards gave us a talk on the new API for Device Drivers.
This was an excellent talk and the new API is part of the system where you can load and unload device drivers without needing to compile special kernels and reboot.

After lunch Brian Somers gave a talk on Using PPP (which he writes).
Brian explained how you can use PPP for more than dialing your ISP. PPP tunnels via http proxies to bypass firewalls was very interesting and showed what tricks you could get up to with PPP.

And Joe Karthauser did his talk on Using CVS to get the latest source code for FreeBSD.
This allows us to run the latest -stable version of FreeBSD (or -current development version if we want) without waiting for the next CD-ROM release. Joe explained the version control system we use and how you can browse the previous versions via the CVSWeb interface.

The talks were all well presented and gave a nice mix of both technical level and user level talks. There were lots of audience questions during the talks and I'm sure everyone learned something. Paul, Brian and Joe all used StarOffice on their FreeBSD powered laptops to produce their slides. StarOffice (which is free) runs via the linux emulator. All the laptops ran FreeBSD 5.0-current too. Thanks go to Mark Ovens for letting us borrow his projector.

Nik Clayton then gave a talk on BSDi in the UK and Europe and announced that he had been hired by BSDi to be their "technology evangelist", helping BSDi grow the FreeBSD marketplace in both the UK and Europe. Congratulations Nik. Netcraft Ltd then gave us a presentation on FreeBSD's market share of web servers. We are 4th, behind Microsoft, Solaris and Linux, but gaining market share.

Finally Nik announced a new startup company, FreeBSD Services Limited
This is made from 6 UKUG members who are also committers, and will provide support contracts, consultancy, training and development work for FreeBSD in the UK. www.freebsd-services.co.uk

Nik also announced two UKUG members are being promoted to Committers for the FreeBSD project. Congratulations Ben Smithurst and Mark Ovens.

After the meeting we all went for beers in the local pub, and Neil bought everyone a drink as it was his birthday. Thanks Neil. (remember there were 40 of us).

And then we headed into Oxford town centre for a curry (at the same place we went last time) for food and general FreeBSD chats.

The first Newcastle social was held on the 29th April 2000. It was organised by Lee Johnston and Tony Watson.

The social started at a club in the centre of Newcastle at around 7pm, where discussion about CVS control of this website was brought up. After a few rounds, we decided to move on to a pub closer to the curry house called "The Telegraph", discussion continued about various points for a good hour or so, until it was time to move on to the curry house at 8:30.

Once in the curry house, discussion of a UK custom FreeBSD release took place, this went on until the early hours of the morning.

The third FreeBSD UKUG was held in London at the Prince of Wales. The meeting was organised by Tony Finch.

The second FreeBSD UK social was held at the Royal Oak pub, and then Jamal's Curry house, in Oxford on the 21st November 1998. It was organised by Paul Richards paul@originative.co.uk.

Many, many topics were discussed, some of them relating to FreeBSD. A write-up, and associated pictures are available.

The first UKUG meeting is over. The meeting which was hosted by Roger Hardiman and the University of Strathclyde was very enjoyable.

The start of the meeting was centred around an ex-bomb disposal robot which has a robot head and two cameras on the head. The robot is controlled from a remote site over two Mobile Phones using ML-PPP (19.2k), the robot head can be controlled by using a VR Helmet, with the view out of the camera displayed in the helmet. Of course this all uses FreeBSD :-)

Other topics discussed included commercial support for FreeBSD, FreeBSD vs. Linux.

Refreshments were kindly supplied by Mark Valentine.