Past Meetings

We have a festival of encryption presentations this month. We'll learn about the GnuPG tools, how and why they work and why you should consider them. We'll also look at using GnuPG tools within a few different email clients.

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Andrew Cant will demonstrate and discuss using GnuPG with the Thunderbird and Mutt email clients. After the presentation the attendes should have enough information to go out and use Thunderbird or Mutt to sign, verify, encrypt and decrypt their email.
The presentation is intended for beginner/intermediate.

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What is GnuPG, you might ask? Well, according to the www.gnupg.org:
"GnuPG is the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC2440 . GnuPG allows to encrypt and sign your data and communication, features a versatile key managment system as well as access modules for all kind of public key directories."

Adam's presentation will attempt to explain what that means and why you might care. This will include an overview of public key cryptography, its uses, and the GnuPG implementation in particular. Time permitting, the use of GnuPG with the KMail email client will also be demonstrated.

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The host for this meeting was John Kerr.

Our special guest presenter for March is Evan Leibovitch. He's a tireless advocate of Open Source and co-founded the Linux Professional Institute and the Canadian Association for Open Source.

This meeting begins at 7pm. Doors open at 6pm for casual conversation and perhaps a Linux-related video.

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Evan Leibovitch will demonstrate and discuss the Drupal Content Management System.

We've had lots of questions about Content Management Systems. A CMS moves the burden of creating a web site from "writing some HTML" to "writing the content." Drupal is a leading open source CMS. Attend this meeting and you'll see why.

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The host for this meeting was Raul Suarez.

Chris Frey will demonstrate and discuss the X Window System from a user's point of view, focusing on the common tools that come with X, regardless of which desktop system you choose to use. The following topics are planned:

* X configuration overview
* The X startup process
* Connecting to your X server
* X managers
o The display manager
o The window manager
o The session manager
* Cut and paste
o What's the difference between the current selection, cut buffer, and clipboard?
* X toys
* Poking around the X window system
* X fonts
* X authentication
* X forwarding
* Security recommendations and conclusion

The presentation is intended for intermediate audiences.
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The host for this meeting was rbclemen.

This introduction to VoIP is aimed at small office / home office users. John will cover hardware, software and configuration issues at the introductory level. The interested attendee will learn what options they have, and what steps to take to implement their own VoIP system. Expect to hear about VoIP phones, analog telephone adapters, telephony cards, Asterisk, TrixBox, and VoIP providers.

Are you interested in a $2.50 phone line at home? How about I throw in enhanced features like "follow me", voice menus, multiple extensions and voice mail for your staff or teens? Finally how about being able to use off the shelf hardware, open source software, and your choice of provider?
Sound too good to be true! It's not, but there is work involved.
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The host for this meeting was richard.

Our guest presenter, Glenn is from Hamilton LUG.

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We have another interesting Linux presentation this month. Our guest presenter, Glenn, will amaze and entertain you with his mastery of the Linux command line.
Make sure you arrive early to get a seat.
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The host for this meeting was richard.

It's a festival of graphics presentations this month!

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Chris (et fil) will demonstrate the Blender 3D modelling package and some of the animated results of Blender.

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In Part One Richard will discuss and demonstrate a few of the many capabilities of the GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Programs). We'll look at

• layers,
• contrast enhancement,
• red-eye reduction
• and expensive wedding photo cliches.

In Part Two we delve deeper into the GIMP and look at other photo-manipulation techniques.

• Fun with banknotes.
• Building an alibi: add yourself to a photo.
• On-line dating or how to put your face on the body of a celebrity.

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The host for this meeting was rbclemen.

This meeting will be held at The Working Centre in Kitchener, Ontario. Our meetings are free and open to those with an interest in Linux.Doors open at 6pm for casual conversation and perhaps a Linux-related video.We have another interesting Open Source project presentation this month. Make sure you arrive early to get a seat. The formal presentation will begin at 7:00pm.
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By popular demand, and no small amount of begging, Robin has agreed to reprise his MythTV presentation. We're told the the new MythTV box includes more goodies now, so prepare to have serious geek-envy.

This meeting will be held at The Working Centre in Kitchener, Ontario. Our meetings are free and open to those with an interest in Linux.Doors open at 6pm for casual conversation and perhaps a Linux-related video.We have another interesting Open Source project presentation this month. Make sure you arrive early to get a seat. As host, I'll be entertaining you with my singing and dancing skills, (Okay, perhaps there won't be any singing and dancing, I'm adding this for Adam and I have an unusual sense of humour --richard) but the main focus of the evening will be a presentation by William Park, from the Toronto Linux User Group. His Open Source project is called ...
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William will demonstrate and discuss his open source project BASH-diff. It is a patch to the bash-3.0 shell incorporating many useful features from Awk, Python, Zsh, Ksh, and others. This presentation will be of great interest to programmers and shell / script fans alike!

Bash.Diff is a patch against Bash shell. In the main core, it adds the following syntax: {a..b}; ${var|...}; then-else-fi to for/while/until/case statements; try-block with string exception;<&lt+; and, <<<<.

As builtin, it adds the following: sscanf(3), <string.h>, <ctype.h> wrappers; array, regex(3), stack, queue operations; GDBM, SQLite, PostgreSQL, MySQL database interfaces; HTML template engine (BASP); Expat XML parser interface; x-y char plot; DOS, CSV, Awk support; Libwebserver interface; RPN calculator with <math.h> functions; and, GTK+2 interface for GUI dialog. Detailed presentation material will be added after the presentation.http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashdiff