We have encouraging news on two fronts this month. First, SCOUG has found a new home in Fullerton at the Grace Christian Church. Thanks are due to Sheridan George, our Vice-President, for finding this venue. It even has a high speed Internet connection. Thanks, Sheridan! With a new place in hand, starting next month, we will be getting our announcements out with more lead time to allow for folks to attend. Having a permanent place should help as well; in these days of shrinking profit margins in the tech sector, it is very difficult to find adequate facilities.

The second bit of news is a little more geeky. In a burst of some brain virus or such, I have donated a small server to SCOUG to house our web site and mail needs. Sundial Systems, home of my favorite software company, has graciously allowed us to use a part of their server for the SCOUG website/mail server over the years. While they are (still) ever gracious, it has come time for them to upgrade their own hardware, and it was after all about time that SCOUG stepped up to the plate and assumed responsibility for the club's system. So if you are viewing this article on the web site, you are using the new hardware to do so. As an interim move, Peter Skye has volunteered to be the webmaster. The server itself is running dual Celeron 466's with 512 Mb RAM, an 8 Gb IDE boot drive, and a Tekram SCSI card into a Seagate 7200 rpm 9 Gb drive. Operating system software is (of course) Warp Server for e-Business, FixPak 3. In an unparalleled act of kindness, Sundial has offered to allow us to continue to use their physical plant and Internet connection for the box. Kudos to Randall and Carla!

While Peter has offered to be interim webmaster, in the longer range we plan to get the Programming SIG involved in handling the maintenance and upgrading of our server. In fact, we are busily hatching plans to have different folks work on the Apache server software, REXX programming (since most of the scripts are written in REXX), the mail software (which is currently an old 1x version of Hethmon Bros InetMail), and other programming needs including documentation. By spreading the work amongst a number of folks, it should be a part-time fun deal for all concerned. If you are interested in helping with the project, e-mail me and I'll put you in touch with the programming SIG folks.

Finally in a note of interest to me if not everyone else, this column is not being written under OS/2 - I blew out my production machine with overheated CPU, partially disabled AGP slot, erratic RAM afterwards, and zapped partitions, including a Win2K one, and three OS/2 partitions. Of course I had religiously backed everything up so there was no problem! Right....

Anyhow, as a result I am writing this article on my test machine, and for the first time it's not being written using any flavor of Windows. No sir, it's being written with Open Office under a Linux distribution called Mepis! Being based on the Debian Linux distribution, the os is very stable, and includes Mozilla 1.5, the Open Office Suite, as well as a bunch of other open source goodies. Having said all that, it will be very nice to have my OS/2 machine back up and running by next month. I miss Clearlook, darn it.

OK, to end. Topics that are under consideration for the upcoming months are:

• Installation and upgrading of the various flavors of Mozilla including Mozilla 1.6, Firefox 0.8 (previously Firebird), and Thunderbird (I think 0.5), along with all of the cool fonts and plug-ins that are available. The software has come a long way in the last few months, and is now my default set of Internet applications under all operating systems;
• A basic introduction to using DFSee, now at version 6.x, the all time wonderful disk partitioning/fixing set of tools that can save your life when stuff goes wrong;
• A tutorial on installing and using PMView 3.x.

If you have some other suggestions, email Tony at tony@scoug.com See you next month.

Copyright 2004 the Southern California OS/2 User Group. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.