[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: KVM, Qemu, libvirt

[Paul Nijjar]

Whoops! The month is almost half-over and we almost forgot to have our
meeting! Some people would have been fine with replacing our meeting
with a webcast, Second Life session or chatroom chat, but I am not one
of them -- face to face shindigs have qualities that are not so easily
virtualized away. No doubt I am a dinosaur, though: the hot computer
trend these days is to virtualize everything: desktops, servers, even
network switches. So when you hear about KVM and virtualization, you
might be forgiven for wondering why we would want to virtualize
Keyboard-Video-Mouse switches, and why we would have an entire meeting
around KVM switches. Have we finally gone too far? 

Probably, but in this context KVM does not refer to hardware, but
another virtualization solution like VMware, VirtualBox, or Xen. Like
these other products, KVM (along with its friends Qemu and libvirt)
allow you to create virtual machine so you can run many instances of
your favourite (and not-so-favourite) operating systems at the same
time. Unlike some of the alternatives, KVM is completely open source,
ships in the Linux kernel, is relatively small, relatively easy to use 
and does not require custom guest binaries to run. Chris Irwin likes
it, which is why he will be telling us all about it this Monday,
starting at 7pm. This presentation will be friendly to those
completely new to virtualization as well as those who may have
experience with other virtualization platforms.

In other news, there's a new site that is trying to list all tech events 
in Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and Guelph (good luck). That site is
http://watcamp.com , and it does have quite a few good events.

In router news our very own Richard Weait will be giving a talk on
"Hacking Your Wireless Router" for the WWITPro group on Monday, April
26 at 7pm. The event is free but requires registration:
http://www.wwitpro.com 

Rumour has it that the evil geniuses at KWartzlab are holding a
release party for Ubuntu 10.04 . Details are sketchy but it looks like
the shindig will be May 1. See
http://kwartzlab.ca/events/2010-05-01/lucid-lynx-release-party 
for details. 

We have a topic request for kernel compilation. If you are interested
in doing this topic (maybe a 20 minute intro in June? Otherwise a
longer presentation) then please get in touch. 

I'm sure there's more but it is sunny out and I want to go look at
pictures of sunshine on my computer. So why don't I tell you that this
month's meeting will again be held at 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria St N
Kitchener
(at Victoria and Weber)

There is some free parking at the "Worth A Second Look" thrift store
parking lot. There are maps and pictures on the website.  


-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org