For the past couple of years, I have been involved in trying to get the Salem Linux Users Group restarted. However, after some time and energy, this quote of an email to a friend pretty much describes it well:

Well, the current status of the LUG is pretty unfortunate. For several months we had some small (2-4) people meetings. They were going fairly well, though they mainly were just the same three people, myself, Bill English, and one other guy. It really was just a social meeting, which is great, but Bill and I can get together with our families, and have a much more enjoyable time. All that being said, we still have a mailing list with about 25 people registered on it. Questions and comments come through from time to time, but it is pretty quiet.

However, with all of that said, if we could get a consistent group of 5 or more people, myself and Bill included, it would give us a reason to have meetings again. Unfortunately it is a “chicken and egg” problem, and one that Bill and I have already put quite a bit of time and energy into. Should we have more people who have genuine linux experience and are willing to have discussions about things other than converting MS Word documents for use in Open Office, I think we could make this group work go.

So, with that in mind, what are your thoughts on the subject?

The problem we are experiencing is nothing that other LUGs haven’t run into. Unfortunately, we are discouraged and haven’t been interested in putting the energy into it for a few months. I still would love to see a LUG is Salem, Or, and I am willing to put energy into it, assuming I can find the right people.

Anyone interested?

I have been using Firefox for the past few months, and with the recent rash if IE vulnerabilities, this has proved to be a very computer “health” conscious decision.

Just yesterday I got shown a plugin called Web Developer Extension. The most basic description would be a “powerful css editing assistant”. It is neat enough that if you aren’t already using Firefox, you should install it just for this plugin.

This morning I found an article on NewsForge about web content filtering for linux. It is entitled A parent’s guide to Linux Web filtering. I have read many other howto’s for web filtering and this is one of the simplest and most straight forward articles I have read yet. If you are at all interested in this topic, give it a look.