- FSLC History 2003-2004
President - Kyle Waters(aka unum) Vice-President - Daniel Miller(aka albino) Secretary - Trent Cameron Webmaster - Roberto Mello(aka rbm) Public Relations - Randy Installfest - Nathan George(aka nage) System Administrator - Travis Heartwell(nafai) COTD Admin - Eldon Koyle(aka esk) Lab Admin - Eldon Koyle(aka esk)
This year's forum featured Jon "maddog" Hall from Linux International as keynote speaker, one hundred and thirty people attended the keynote. We also had presentation by Dr. Wiley of USU, Novel, and many others. This year's forum was hosted in Widstoe Hall. As part of the forum Maddog talked to members of the N&CS department and representatives from the CS and BIS departments. The key result of this meeting was the installation of Firefox and OpenOffice.org on all SLS lab machines. Novel gave the club a nice vinyl sign with the club's logo on it. A lot of work went into advertising for this forum. Over a hundred letters were mailed inviting various local businesses to attend. The list was obtained from ASUSU and probably not one person came as a result of the letters. Albino printer hundreds of fliers we went around town papering cars in parking a lots across town with these fliers. We also posted fliers in many local businesses (and thanks to Albino created a list of businesses that did and did not let us post). This forum brought about the clubs first wiki hosted on Eldon's computer. Eldon remastered Knoppix using wallpaper and other art work by Nathan George. Dirk Howard burned hundreds of these and the club distributed them at the forum (and for sometime afterwards). It's widely believed the Albino did not sleep for the two weeks prior to the forum, and in case you were wondering Kinko's is open 24 hours a day.
This year also saw FSLC begin a coordination project with the CS department of maintaining the Computer Science Departments Linux labs. This project was taken on over the Christmas break by Eldon Koyle and Kyle Waters. The machines had been running a two year old version of Mandrake Linux with a publicized root password. We installed Debian Sid with Gnome(default) and KDE. We tried to use partimage but eventually ended up using system imager. We learned a lot about doing network boots that week. We actually set up our own DHCP server, using Eldon's own computer, that would only serve out requests to the computers in that lab. We would have to unplug the switch so that the real DHCP server wouldn't answer the requests before Eldon's computer could. Eventually KDE was removed(by Eldon The Fascist). We tried to install anything we thought might ever be useful. So there are c++ and java ides. As well as the gimp and many games. At this point we were only running the lab in Old Main 428. FSLC also hosted a CVS work shop taught by Dirk Howard. The turn out was not as good as we had hoped. The course was excellent and well prepared. We learned to better advertise for future workshops.
- The club held it's first programming contest this year. We had two problems designed by Paul Cannon. The questions were designed in such a way that member could use the language of their choice. Prizes were given based on sever categories including speed, code length, and elegance of the code. Travis Hartwell won most of the categories with Wayne taking first done. Dr. Flann helped judge the contest. The contest was held in the Old Main 428 lab, which we had begun maintaining earlier that year. This year we also hosted a demo day on the fourth floor of Old Main, which increased our visibility to the CS Department. We also began selling membership cards. We also tried to create a formal membership list based off of participation, but it never really worked. There was also an extensive revision effort for the club constitution. Dr. Vicki Allan agreed to do a Perl presentation for one of our meetings. This brought one of the highest turn outs ever to an FSLC meeting. Dr. Erbacher also did a presentation on computer security. Nathan George got an artist to design a logo for the club, this logo was used to create t-shirts. We ordered 50 t-shirts and sold them for $10 a piece. At the forum that year it was great to see so many members going around in their penguin shirts. The design for the t-shirts eventually lead to the "great logo controversy". Dirk Howard began taping many of our regular meetings and posting Albino would post them on the server. We also tried to encourage presenters to give us their slides so we could post them. FSLC had a combined closing social with the BIS-ACM.