History - Updated March 19, 2023

By: Alan J. Raul - May 28, 2020

The SLO Linux Users Group story began in mid 1999. At that time it was called the SLO Bytes Linux Users Group. Our first meetings were held in an Arroyo Grande clubhouse offered by David Grant (Passed away at 96 on September 24, 2015). Then Ray Miklas offered his computer and family room located in his San Luis Obispo home to us for our meetings. We had our meetings there for a few years until SLONET, now KCBX.net, offered to us free use of their new Training Center located at 4100 Vachell Lane in San Luis Obispo. Due to the recent Covid-19 Pandemic we are now meeting virtually online using Zoom. Our last in-person meeting at KCBX Training Center was on March 12, 2020.

Our members have ranged in age from 13 years old to people into their 90's. We still have members that attended the very first meetings held in the clubhouse back in 1999.

Our first Linux distribution we played with was PHAT Linux. This distribution was created by a couple of teenage kids and ran in a Windows partition. I still remember showing Ben Hansen (Passed away at 91 in August, 2017) the Phat Linux distribution at a SLONET Users Group meeting at Quality Suites in San Luis Obispo. The next day he was calling me with all kinds of questions, with only a few I could answer. With that, the seed was planted for a SLO Bytes SIG (Special Interest Group) which dealt with Linux.

Throughout the years we have migrated to different Linux distributions like Mandriva (formerly called Mankdrake), Simply Mepis and now Ubuntu or an Ubuntu derivatives like Linux Mint, Ubuntu Mate or Pop!_OS.
 
Our meetings are scheduled to begin at 6:30 PM. Without exception people start arriving before 6 PM. Many years back it was not uncommon to have our meetings last for hours and hours. Some meetings have ended with a few people still in attendance at 12:45 AM the following day!!!

We have had the pleasure with working with the Cal Poly LUG (still active) in some of their early installfests as well as a great group of guys from the SLOLUG.org (not in existence anymore). Our group comprised over half the SLOLUG.org group.

Over the years we have had to deal with video cards, monitor resolutions, dial-up-modems and Wi-Fi cards configuration issues. Linux today is so advanced that these have become non-issues. Today, we now concentrate on USING Linux as we would Windows without the worries or hassles of maintaining an Antivirus or spyware program.

We obtained a new domain and a slight name change in 2010. The "Bytes" was removed in order to simplify getting a new domain. http://www.slolug.com/
Digital West http://www.digitalwest.net/, a local Internet company, has donated web space and Mailman service to our group in March 2010.

We now use Mailchimp http://mailchimp.com/  for our monthly meeting notices as of January 2015.

Alan Raul has donated GoDaddy domain registration since 2010 and web space hosting for SLOLUG as of January 2015.
The http://www.slolug.com/ domain is paid till Jan 14, 2024. The domain is now hosted at https://www.namecheap.com/.

Although our group is Linux based, we sometimes stray and talk about other operating systems but we try to stay on point with Linux. Our discussions include a variety of computer technology topics as it relates to Linux, hardware and security.

Over the last 20 years our SLO Linux Users Group has grown alongside the growth of Linux. Only time will tell where Linux and the SLO Linux Users Group will be in 3 years, 5 years.....