Write-Up of August 21st LUG Meeting

Another fantastic meeting was held at the EACOSS centre in Nakawa.

As the poll topic was "Linux Gaming", Kyle, Reinier and I chose to download a variety of games we thought showcased Linux gaming at it's best. Namely the following;

OpenArena
Battle of Wesnoth
Tux Racer
Frozen Bubble.

I think openarena managed to grab everyones attention with the number of kills going on! (4 for yours truely!).

We didn't get to show off all the games such as

VegaStrike
FlightGear
Enemy Territory
Assault Cube
LegacyDoom
PenMush

We also ended up show casing some non Linux games just to compare and also played Doom for those of us old enough to remember this ancient all time favorite. It also allowed us to show off the fact that some games are multi-platform compatible.

In total we had over 9Gb of Games, which we managed to burn onto DVD for a few people but I plan to use another utility which I discussed called RemasterSys to make a custom build over a couple of DVD's.

This utility allows you to create a custom Live/Install CD/DVD of any Ubuntu/Debian install. Basic format is install all the packages you want installed then install and run RemasterSys. You either run is as a full backup which includes all you custom settings, or as a distributable version which has no custom setting but all the packages you previously installed.

The most obvious use of this is to create a custom recovery DVD with all your favorite applications already installed. Or maybe a custom recovery CD of you Postfix/Zimbra server once you have it up and running!

Anyway the details can be found on the RemasterSys website. http://www.geekconnection.org/remastersys/remastersystool.html

Just install the custom repository and off you go!

We also had the amazing pleasure of famed E.African blogger Erik Hersman. As some of you may know Erik writes a great African Technology blog over at http://www.whiteafrican.com. Erik talked us through another website he has co-created with many other called http://www.ushahidi.com/ which is a "platform that crowdsources crisis information". If you haven't checked this very cool open source driven site out I'd throughly recommend it.

Chris Kasangaki announced that he has managed via the Sun Acedemy to get some low cost entries for those interested in getting a Java Qualification. If you'd like to hear more about it I'd suggest dropping him an email on the list.

We ended the evening by several of us piling into cars and heading off to Kati-Kati for an curry and engaging chat about Tech, Politics, Broadband and everything in between, and all the whilst England Cricket Team were thumping Australia on the big screen!

I'd like to to throw out a big thank you to the team at EACOSS, namely Stacy and Chris for helping us and letting us take over their home.

Reinier for getting to the venue on time, so Kyle and I could be dramatically late. Jon and Erik for providing the beer! Everyone else for coming and making a fantastic event as always and showing me gamers do exist in Uganda.