[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: ZFS, btrfs

[Paul Nijjar]

For some reason, those of us in the Free Software world love to become
partisan about software alternatives. GNOME vs KDE, vi vs emacs, BSD
vs Linux, Drupal vs Wordpress... the list goes on and on. We pick
our sides and fight off challengers, even though we are all
working towards the same ends and should really be allies.  Can't we
all just get along?  If we're going to be partisan, why not be
partisan over rational things, such as sports teams?

Another pair of contenders has entered the fray, vying for the title
of "most awesome next generation fileysystem". The venerable
ext2/ext3/ext4 series of filesystems on Linux have fended off many
(sometimes technologically-superior) challengers, and remains the
default filesystem on many Linux distributions to this day. But
filesystems have progressed a lot since ext2 was developed, and its
days as the system default are likely numbered.

In the one corner is ZFS, the file system originally developed for
Solaris by Sun Microsystems (back when there was a Sun Microsystems).
ZFS is more prominent in the BSD world, but it has been ported to
Linux as an unofficial kernel module, and some people use it in the
wild. Lori Paniak is one of those people, and he will share some of
the ZFS story with us, focussing on the interesting tale of how the
porting was implemented. 

In the other corner is btrfs (pronounced "Butter-FS"), a next
generation filesystem native to the Linux kernel.  Although btrfs is
still under development it is already supported on several distros,
including some enterprise ones.  First-time KWLUG presenter Gary
Cameron will discuss what btrfs has to offer. These presentations will
begin at 7pm.

In other news, Software Freedom Day is a go for this year! We will
hold our celebrations a week later than everybody else -- on Saturday,
September 28, from 10am-4pm, at Kwartzlab (33 Kent St, at the corner
of Kent and Charles). You are all invited, and people you know who
might not be as familiar with the Free Software movement and why it
matters are doubly invited.

Two themes have emerged from this year's SFD organizing. The first is
multimedia: a number of presentations will deal with creating
(Blender) and organizing (XBMC, MediaGoblin) multimedia
files. The second theme is GNU: this year marks the 30th anniversary
of the operating system userland that most of us use every day. It is
easy to ignore the GNU in GNU/Linux, so during this Software Freedom
Day celebrations we will give GNU its due. 

For more information about Software Freedom Day please visit 
http://www.theworkingcentre.org/sfd . To help out, contact
sfd at theworkingcentre.org 

Here are a couple of KWLUG logistic notes. Firstly: if you have
free-software-related events you would like to see in this meeting
announcement, please forward them to me or broadcast your request to
the kwlug-disc list. Secondly: we are looking for some KWLUG
presentations for November and December. If you would be interested in
sharing your enthusiasm about some free-software-related topic, please
get in touch. Enthusiasm about beginner-friendly topics (ie those
topics you struggled with as a new user) would be particularly
welcome. 

And that's it, except for the location of this month's meeting: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(corner of Victoria and Weber)
Kitchener

The meeting starts at 7pm. Doors open around 6:30pm, and we are
super-grateful for help in getting the presentation space set up. 
There is some gratis parking in the Worth a Second Look parking lot,
and lots of gratis bike parking along the side of the building. You
can find maps and pictures of the meeting location:
http://kwlug.org/node/709

- Paul
-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org