This past Monday I hosted the monthly Northern New Jersey Linux Meetup at Panera Bread. It is the 7th meeting I have organized ever since taken over the group back in September 2004. I managed to get there earlier than usual and took advantage of the extra time to write down some ideas I had for a new pet project of mine and get some good coffee. One hour later some of the frequent attendees arrived. One cool thing we managed to do in relatively little time was to perform a new install on someone’s laptop. The distro of choice was Ubuntu Warty and the entire process took less than 20 minutes. The only thing we didn’t manage to setup was the USB wireless adapter but that can be fixed once the laptop is plugged to a network and the appropriate drivers are installed. I only wish more people had attended the meeting to see this… One item we discussed was the possibility of combining our meetings with that of other Meetup groups from Northern NJ. It seems that the turn out for the Slashdot, MySQL, and PHP groups is not that great and we thought that by adding 1 or 2 people from each group to a common group would allow us to attract a bigger audience and boost the organizer’s motivation. The organizer for the Slashdot group told me nobody showed up for his last 2 meetings and he ended up sitting there all by himself. He’s very disappointed and understandably is considering droping the reins of the group. Hang in there buddy… I can completely relate to it… Well, now we have to get in touch with the other organizers and see if they want to join forces and form the new “Geek Alliance of New Jersey.”