John Quigley gave a presentation on using SLIME with SBCL on a Debian system yesterday during the Chicago LUG meeting. There is a PDF file version of his presentation but I forgot to jot down the URL for it. John, perhaps you'd send it to the list? Since the presentation was made using Debain, and therefore used apt-get, somebody asked about getting the packages if one didn't use Debian. The following two sites are good places for lots of general information about lisp and have links to all of the packages mentioned during the presentation: http://common-lisp.net/ http://www.cl-user.net/asp/root-dir.
After the presentation, John and four of us who came to the meeting mostly because of our interest in the chicago-lisp group got together for a brief chat about chicago-lisp. We talked about what to do going forward and I believe that the consensus was to try to start meeting on a more regular basis. Apparently the space being used for the CLUG meetings would be available for other chicago-lisp gatherings. John asked if everyone was mostly interested in lisp in particular or rather a broader range of topics, for instance functional languages such as Scheme or ML. There was a bit of difference of opinion on this topic and I think it might still be a bit of an open question. One suggestion was that the group might want to start host a web-site, perhaps as an excuse for a group project. A wiki as well as cliki <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ CLiki> and AllegroServer http://allegroserve.sourceforge.net/ were discussed. Another idea was to adopt a project from Common Lisp Gardeners http://tinyurl.com/ymgp7h. For those who might not be familiar with the CL Gardeners (ibid):
A group of people intending to "tend the Common Lisp Garden". Their goal is two-fold : improving the attractiveness of CL for people who are considering using it, and providing those who want to learn the language with a plethora of small projects, so that they can learn it by practicing it, yet in a useful way.