Past Meetings

Each year, the Free Software Foundation holds a conference in Boston. This year, some people in Kitchener-Waterloo are organizing a satellite event to be held at the Delta Hotel in Waterloo. They write:

We're excited to be hosting our own version of LibrePlanet, an annual conference hosted by the Free Software Foundation in Boston for free software enthusiasts and anyone who cares about the intersection of technology and social justice. LibrePlanet brings together software developers, law and policy experts, activists, students, and computer users to learn skills, celebrate free software accomplishments, and face challenges to software freedom. Newcomers are always welcome, and LibrePlanet 2020 will feature programming for all ages and experience levels. The theme for LibrePlanet 2020 is "Free the Future".

For the first time ever, all the great presentations of LibrePlanet are coming to Canada! Bringing in the main talks via live stream, with space for local hallway track and more, LibrePlanet Canada Satellite Edition is your chance to meet with like-minded participants and take in the event from Canada. For those in Southern Ontario who find travel to Boston just beyond their price range, or those in Canada or anywhere else who have difficulties with travel to the USA, this is the version of LibrePlanet for you.

Tickets have a suggested price ranging from $50 (for students/low-waged) to $250 (for those being sponsored by their companies). Pricing is flexible in that you can pay less (or more!) for tickets depending on your financial circumstances.

Learn more about the conference and register at https://2020.libreplanet.ca/

R. Brent Clements will give a beginner-friendly tutorial on Audacity.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about the third leg of his journey in building out web infrastructure at scale. He writes:

I have talked about Docker and LXC out of my own experience. Now I've been Salt-ing the whole infrastructure ( https://docs.saltstack.com/en/latest/ ).

I'd love to share my own finite experience, findings, choices (not ideal, of course). I'd love to hear your comments, your perspective and your "war stories".

As usual, I'll talk from a perspective of doing it from ground up, the simple way possible (forever novice).

 

Tim Laurence will discuss his adventures with USB over IP.

In the second half of the talk we will have a roundtable-type Q&A. Bring your questions! Bring your answers!

John Steel will give a beginner-friendly introduction to SSL certificates and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI).

Stephen Paul Weber will tell us about Dhall, a non-Turing-complete, non-repetitive configuration language intended to replace YAML and/or JSON.

(The Dhall logo is CC-BY 4.0 from the Dhall website.)

Update: Stephen's slides are here: https://singpolyma.net/presentations/2020/006/dhall/

Nathan Fish will tell us about systemd.

Chris Blasko will give an overview of computer vision, with an emphasis on object recognition.

Paul Nijjar will give a conceptual, high-level overview of how to use git, with the end goal of making a pull request on a Gitlab/Github project. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Hubert Chathi is a developer for Matrix, a real-time communications protocol.that supports end-to-end encrypted decentralized communication. Hubert will tell us about the project and some of its features.

Update: Hubert has posted his slides to his website: https://www.uhoreg.ca/documents/kwlug-2019-matrix/__/matrix

Sandeep Johri will tell us about how he uses Syncthing to keep his files safe.

Gheorghe Curelet-Balan will tell us about blockchains. He writes:

This talk will introduce the fundamental concepts & features of a blockchain (permanent distributed ledger, transaction & block building, block mining, proof of work, incentives, governance, etc.) in the context of bitcoin's step by step operation.

Sandeep Johri will tell us how he set up and secured his home network. His hope is that the audience can help him identify issues and vulnerabilities. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about PrivacySafe, a product he is developing to provide "simple private and secure servers for your home".

Unfortunately, Joan will be unable to present for us in September. Stay tuned for a replacement presentation.

Andrew Cant will describe the tools and workflow behind WRDashboard, an information aggregator for Waterloo Region.

Jason Eckert has been using Vim for decades. He will give us a beginner-friendly tutorial of the text editor.

Update: Jason has provided his slides, linked below.

Mikalai Birukou will tell us about Docker Swarm, a native clustering system for Docker.

Paul Nijjar has an old and slow computer, so lives his life in a terminal window as much as possible. He will describe some of the end-user applications he uses in this interface, including: web surfing, playing multimedia files, reading news, notetaking, and more. This presentation is beginner-friendly.

Update 2: Mikalai has provided his slides and his sample Dockerfile configs. See the attachments below.

Update: Paul's notes are here: https://kwlug.org/node/1174

and some sample config files for the utilities he uses are here:

https://kwlug.org/sites/default/files/2019-07/2019-07-08-terminal-life-examples.tgz

Update: Due to an urgent family situation, John Kerr won't be able to present his LaTeX at the Law Library talk this month. The GDB presentation is still on, and we will have a roundtable discussion to close out the meeting.

Sergio Durigan Junior will give us an overview of GDB, the GNU Debugger. He will illustrate some basic usage and show us some exciting advanced features.

Update: The sources for Sergio's slides are here: https://git.sergiodj.net/talks/gdb-intro-kwlug.git/ . A PDF copy of the result is linked below.

We will have a roundtable discussion focused on commandline utilities such as wget, curl, and other commands you might find in shell scripts. (Update: this did not happen.)

(The GNU Archer Fish logo is licensed CC-BY-SA 3.0 by Jamie Guinan and Andreas Arnez)

Nathan Fish will tell us about the Interplanetary File System, a peer-to-peer distributed protocol that could replace HTTP and make the Web decentralized again.

Doug Moen will revisit Curv, the functional 3D modelling language he developed to create art using mathematics.

Bob B will give us an introduction to OpenVAS, the Open Vulnerability Access Scanner, including how he used Proxmox to set up his demo lab.

Victor Kofia will discuss NixOS and the Nix package manager. Nix takes a declarative approach to systems configurations, and all upgrades/rollbacks are atomic. It bills itself as "the purely functional Linux distribution."

Update: Bob took a screencast of his desktop during the presentation, which he combined with the audio from the podcast. Get it here: https://archive.org/download/kwlug-2019-04-01-openvms-nixos/KWLUG-OpenVAS-Proxmox-joined.mp4

Also, Bob provided some additional information following his presentation. He writes:

From my show and tell last night, some links of possible interest:

• How to install OpenVAS Vulnerability Scanner in Kali Linux (Easy peasy): https://www.linuxhelp.com/how-to-install-openvas-vulnerability-scanner-in-kali-linux
• Install OpenVAS on Debian 9 (Stretch) (I got this running inside a LXC container from this tutorial): https://www.blackhat.pm/tutorial-install-openvas-on-debian-9-stretch.html
• Kali Linux - Penetration testing Distribution: https://www.kali.org/
• Metasploitable - purposefully vulnerable machine for training: https://sourceforge.net/projects/metasploitable/
• Proxmox ISO installer can be found here: https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve
• Adding Proxmox to an existing Debian Stretch machine: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Install_Proxmox_VE_on_Debian_Stretch

Note: The location for this meeting has changed. It will now be held at TriOS College.

Chris Irwin will give us a practical overview of UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), the successor to computer BIOSes, and GUID partition tables, the successor to MBR tables.

Jason Eckert will tell us about Pop!_OS, a Linux distribution by hardware manufacturer System76. This presentation will be beginner-friendly.

Unfortunately Tom will not be able to present the Linux Mint presentation this month.

Note: The location for this meeting has changed. It will now be held at TriOS College.

Tim Laurence will lead a discussion on tools you can use to identify bottlenecks in systems.

Brent Clements will talk about game emulators in Linux.

Note: Benjamin Tompkins's presentation on virtual machines has been postponed.

Important: We have had a last-minute switch in meeting location. For this month's meeting we will meet at our old location, St John's Kitchen.

Jason Eckert will discuss the care and feeding of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which allows you to run Linux "natively" on a Windows 10 machine.

Update: Jason has provided his slides, and written a blog post about this presentation's contents.

Lanny Cox will talk about tiling window managers -- in particular the i3 window manager.

Mikalai Birukou will give us an introduction to LXD, the Linux container management system. LXD provides a cheap way to experiment with different installations. He says this is a beginner-friendly talk for those who dabble on the command line or are beginner sysadmins.

Jason Eckert will discuss interesting SSH tips and tricks.

Update: Jason has uploaded his slides. He notes that the Star Wars ASCII art is available by telnetting to towel.blinkenlights.nl, and the book he mentioned is here: https://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digital/dp/0140244328

Mark Steffen will demonstrate how to detect compromised sites using tools such as Burp Suite, Nikto and Vega.

Jim Kelsh will offer a beginner-friendly presentation on running Linux in a virtual machine, using Windows 10 as the host operating system.

Khalid Baheyeldin has been playing with inexpensive Wifi and Bluetooth enabled microcontrollers. These can be programmed using the Arduino IDE or Micropython (which runs on the chip instead of an operating system). He  will tell us about the Internet of Things (IoT) and how to use such microcontrollers to interface devices to things like home automation packages (e.g. Home Assistant), and much more. 

Colin Knapp will update us on GitLab, the "open core" Git-repository manager. He calls his presentation "Creating Problems to Solve Problems in GitLab". Some of the topics he will cover include:

• How to organize and compartmentalize projects to reduce testing and growing pains.
• How to deal with increased complexity in compartmentalized projects
• The GitLab development cycle tools he uses when working on Tugthr.
• How he uses the built-in Kanban boards and commit messages to close tickets
• How GitLab-Runners work, and the difference between shared cloud runners and runners on your own hardware.

The remaining time will consist of an electronics swap meet. Do you have useful electronics that are no longer of use to you? Would you like to pick up some electronics for an upcoming project? Do you have stories to tell about cool older technology. Bring your things to giveaway and trade. If you have surplus, it will be sent to an organization that will dispose of it responsibly (Kwartzlab or Computer Recycling).