KWLUG Historical Information

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The first planning for KWLUG began in the summer of 2001 and has held monthly meetings since. The first official meeting was held on October 13, 2001 (meeting announcement).

This archive of early meeting topics lists several "firsts" in the group.

An easy way to explore KWLUG history is to view content by page category.

Past Projects

Over the years KWLUG has embarked on several initiatives, many of which are now defunct or on hiatus. This section commemorates that history.

  • In 2007 KWLUG members John van Ostrand and Richard Weait founded Ontario Linux Fest, which ran annually from 2007-2009.
  • From 2008-2014 KWLUG members organized Software Freedom Day celebrations in September.
  • The group used to maintain a lending library of paper books, and attempted to catalogue those books on the website. As of this writing (Feb 2017) some remnants of the library are still stored at Computer Recycling, but most of the listings are hopelessly out of date. Pay them a visit if you are interested in borrowing materials.
  • In the early 2000s KWLUG used to make Linux distros and other free software available on CD. Here is a isting of that old software collection.
  • Another initiative consisted of writing informative Learning Posts and organizing them into books. Some of the categorization of these book pages has been lost, but many of the articles (especially those involving the bash shell) are still relevant.
  • The FLOSS Fund was an attempt to finance free software projects via voluntary donations. It ran from approximately 2007-2012. By that point Kickstarter had kickstarted the crowdfunding movement, and interest in the FLOSS Fund petered out.
  • A long time ago KWLUG attempted to promote Local Activities conducted by KWLUG members.

Website History

The first version of this website used the PHPNuke content management system. This was put together by Marko Vidberg.

That website was replaced with one running an early version of Drupal (maybe Drupal 4.7?). Dates are fuzzy as to when this was switched over.

In early 2006, there was some discussion about what should replace the Drupal 4 site. Contenders were Drupal 5 vs Joomla. Drupal 5 won, and the new website was developed by Richard Weait.

In 2011, John van Ostrand migrated the Drupal 5 website to Drupal 6 in a single weekend.

Discussion around replacing the Drupal 6 site began in 2015, but was not carried out until 2017. Drupal 6 content was migrated to Drupal 8.

In 2022 the Drupal 8 site was upgraded to Drupal 9, and then at the end of the year was upgraded again to Drupal 10.