MonadLUG notes, 8-March-2007: Pitch your distro

[Ted Roche]

The second Thursday of the month is the usual meeting of the Monadnock
Area Linux User Group, MonadLUG, at the SAU #1 offices on Hancock Road
in Peterborough. This month, Ray Côté ran a discussion on "Pitch Your
Distro" and Bill Sconce took on the "Man Page of the Month" on the
command tac.

You won't think you could make much of a presentation on tac, but that
would be underestimating Bill Sconce ;) Here's the short form: tac is
cat backwards. Longer form: tac lets concatenates files, but reverses
the line ordering of the result, so you get last line first. There are
only a couple switches, -s to specify a separator other than newline and
-r to use a regex separator. Using this simple tool, Bill was able to
present a wicked example that reversed not only line order by character
order, and lead to a discussion about the use of regular expressions,
piping, precedence, quoting and backticks. A good time was had by all.

The main discussion was a let's-go-around-the-room discussion of what
distros are in use and why and for what. With nine people present (and
one of them a non-combatant), how many distros would you expect? We
heard about: Debian, Slackware, OpenBSD, OS X, Fedora, RedHat, CentOS,
SuSE, Mandrake, Ubuntu, Xubuntu, more RedHat, Knoppix, Gentoo, Libranet
and some Knoppix war stories. Many aspects of the different distros were
discussed: cost, support, lifespan, the difficulties of sound cards, and
more.

Many thanks to Ray for running the meeting, Bill for tac and bringing a
projector, and all for participating.

Next month's meeting (April 12th) will have Seth Cohn presenting Drupal.
Hope to see you there!

-- 
Ted Roche
Ted Roche & Associates, LLC
http://www.tedroche.com