[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Vagrant Workshop

[Paul Nijjar]

Are you feeling restless this new year? As if you have no home? Maybe
it is time to experiment with vagrancy. This month, Justin Filip will
help us get our hands (and feet?) dirty. He is leading an interactive,
hands-on workshop on Vagrant, the virtualization tool that helps build
repeatable, reliable development environments. To participate in the
workshop, Justin asks that you bring the following: 

- A laptop that is "sufficiently powerful" for virtual machines (eg
  has virtualization extensions enabled, and lots of RAM)
- Virtualbox installed on the laptop (available from
  https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads )
- Vagrant installed on the laptop (available from
  https://www.vagrantup.com/downloads.html ) 
- A text editor you are comfortable using

The nice thing about Vagrant is that it works with Linux as well as
Mac OS and Windows, so you can bring whatever laptop you want with the
appropriate software involved. The workshop will involve setting up a
Ruby development environment, but you don't need to know about Ruby
(or virtual machines!) to benefit.

Participating in a hands-on way will help you get the most out of
this workshop, but you are still welcome to attend. If you do not have
a suitable laptop then maybe there will be opportunities to pair up
with others who do.

Justin says that the workshop will be action-packed, so we will be
starting the presentation as quickly after 7pm as we can manage. 

In other news, KW Linux Fest is coming up on Saturday, January 28. It
will be held at 200 Bathurst Drive in Waterloo, and will feature
speakers throughout the day. The cost is $5. Sign up for the
conference at http://kwlinuxfest.ca . 

After a few months hiatus (sorry) we are holding another Laptop Rescue
Mission. This will be a week before KW Linux Fest, on Saturday January
21, at Computer Recycling (66 Queen Street South, Kitchener). It will
run between 4-8pm or so. We will sift through donated laptops and get
Xubuntu installed on them.  As usual, everybody is welcome, and you do
not need to be a Linux expert to participate (as far as I can tell,
several non-experts have participated and enjoyed the experience). To
participate, please RSVP to me so that I can tell you how to get into
the building.

Is public speaking one of your New Years resolutions? How about giving
a talk for KWLUG? We have presentation slots available from February
on. As long as the topic relates to free/open source software it is
fair game. You could talk about: 

- Some FLOSSy thing you played with recently.
- Some FLOSSy topic you are passionate about, or use regularly. 
- Some FLOSSy topic you would like to learn about, but which you won't
  get around to learning without a motivation (hint: preparing a
  presentation counts as motivation)

Your presentation could be 30, 40, or 90 minutes long. We are a
friendly audience, so are a good group to practice on. If you are
interested, get in touch with me or the kwlug-disc mailing list and we
can arrange something.

And that's it for now. This month's meeting will be held at the usual
location: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(at Weber)
Kitchener

See http://kwlug.org/sjk for maps and pictures of the location.
Doors open around 6:30pm, and setup helpers are always appreciated.
There is parking at the thrift store parking lot, and bike parking
(!?) along the side of the building.

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