Having moved from Ottawa to beijing in July, i was eager to find a LUG group here and I found one!b I am just back from my 1st meeting of BLUG, the Beijing Linux User Group (http://www.clubbeautiful.com/) and I think this mini "report" will interest you. The meeting was held in a Russian restaurant where people (a crowd of about 40 tonight) eat and drink while listening to the talks. The crown is half Chinese, half foreigner and the talks and Q&A are all in English. The talks are not targeted at beginners but at serious geeks. Tonight we had 2 talks: The 1st one was about the effort that taobao.com (the "Chinese Ebay") puts into kernel development. They focus of 3 fields: high memory load (64-128GB), high-io loads and high performance NIC. Taobao.com aims at being in the top 100 contributors of patches to the kernel. See http://code.taobao.org/ The 2nd one was about how China is working on a "national CPU" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson) that will free them of Intel and AMD. Linux is already running on this CPU. That's all for now! Charles -- Charles Nadeau Ph.D. http://charlesnadeau.blogspot.com/