Past Meetings

Due to the organizer being sick and having no stamina, we are deferring this session. Stay tuned to this space for rescheduling details.

Note: This may be the last refurbishing session for a while, so if you have been waiting to participate this is your chance.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

Tim Laurence will lead an interactive tutorial on setting up and using Docker. If you have a laptop, you can bring it and follow along.

Tim has made Docker preparatory materials available at https://github.com/timdaman/docker-tutorial. He writes: "Tell people to be prepared or else. ;)" which probably means he is not going to make time at the beginning of the evening for people to get set up.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

This month's meeting will feature two speakers. First, Raul Suarez will demonstrate how he mastered a DVD (?!) full of photos for his parents. Bob Jonkman will also demonstrate video editing with KDEnlive.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

Let's get together and talk nerdy to each other. Bring conversation topics, FLOSS problems you are struggling with, and demos to share.

Conestoga College is organizing an inaugural Linux Fest. It will feature a variety of speakers.
We will post more information as it becomes available.

It will be held on Saturday, 30 January 2016 from 9:00am-4:00pm in room 1E05 at the Doon Campus of Conestoga College.

Cost: $5.00 at the door

Schedule:

9:30->10:40: Bob Jonkman :: What is Free Software?

10:40->12:00: Randy Kolenko

12:00->1:00: Lunch (Pizza and Coffee :: A programmer's favorite meal)

1:00->2:10: Ed Barsalou :: IOT Talk

2:10-3:20: Colin J. Mills :: LFS Educational?

3:20-4:00: Bob Jonkman :: GNU social -- Participatory Demonstration. Bring your laptop/tablet/phone!

4:00-4:20: Closing remarks.

Organizer: Colin J. Mills (cjm)
E-mail: colin.j.mills96@gmail.com

Conestoga College, Kitchener Ontario Canada.
2nd Year Software Engineer.

"Don't patch bad code - rewrite it" -- P. J. Plauger

View and download the poster from Flickr! (CC0 by Laurel L. Russwurm)

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

Marc Paré offers us two presentations this month. He will discuss his usage of Mageia Linux (neé Mandriva neé Mandrake), a distribution geared towards ease-of-use.

He will also discuss the use of tax software on Linux.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

Bob Jonkman will tell us about GNU Social, the federated microblogging platform that started its life as StatusNet. If you bring a wifi-enabled device with you (laptop, phone or tablet) then you will be able to participate in the live demonstration.

UPDATE: Bob has made his presentation slides available.

Every so often a group of KWLUGers volunteers to rescue laptops donated to the Computer Recycling project at The Working Centre. For assorted reasons it is not viable for Computer Recycling to spend much time refurbishing these laptops itself, so we sort through them, select ones in reasonable condition, then install Xubuntu on them for resale.

You are invited to come help! You do not need to be a Linux nerd or a hardware genius to participate: if you can use a screwdriver, read numbers and follow instructions then you can be helpful. There will be lots to learn, but you can learn it as you go along. Linux nerds and hardware geniuses are also welcome to participate, of course.

To participate, please RSVP using the Contact Us functionality on this website. Because Computer Recycling is ordinarily closed on Saturdays, you will need special instructions to get into the building.

We will start at around 4pm and end around 8pm, but if you can only come later or have to leave earlier that's fine too.

R. Brent Clements will demonstrate some free software tools for sound creation and editing.

Brent knows his sound. Need a DJ for a dance or a wedding? Putting on a play or a show? Brent's your guy. In addition to being an audio artisan, he is also a free software enthusiast. Over the years he has collected a suite of open source sound tools. In this presentation he will share some of his toolkit, and show how to use free software for podcasting, music recording and/or sound production.

Raul Suarez will present user-oriented file synchronization. He writes:

In the past we have heard about rsync and own cloud and other mechanisms
that, among other things, can be used to keep data synchronized across devices.

I work on several computers at home. Recently I found that I had to
remember in which computer I left the latest version of certain documents.

I went from computer to computer until I decided I needed a way to
synchronize them.
I compared and evaluated several tools and finally came to the one that
worked better for me. In this presentation I will go through the different tools I investigated
so you can decide which one works for you.

Khalid Baheyeldin will relate his adventures replacing a defective drive on his laptop, while keeping all the data from his old drive. There are a few tricks involved, such as getting hibernate to work.

Update: Khalid has made his presentation slides available here:
http://baheyeldin.com/articles/linux/presentation-replacing-laptop-disk-linux.html

We will follow this up with a roundtable discussion on techniques and best practices for supporting new (and possibly nontechnical) Linux users, especially in a world with cloud services.

Andrew Cant will present a gentle introduction to the Git version control system.

UPDATE: You can access Andrew's demo slides here: https://github.com/acant/git-cli-presentation-2015.

Chris Irwin will follow up his successful April meeting on btrfs by covering his experiences with backups and btrfs snapshots.

John Kerr snapped up a Raspberry Pi 2 board when they went on sale, and he will show off his toy and discuss its suitability as a "real computer".

The second half of the meeting will consist of audience questions and audience answers to those questions. Bring your questions! Bring your answers!

Marc Paré is involved with the LibreOffice development community, and he will discuss the project. He is interested in growing a local developer community around LibreOffice.

Update: The meeting slides are available in ODP and PDF format.

Jotham Apaloo will show us how he uses systemd-timers in place of cron jobs on his machine.

John Kerr ran into a scheduling conflict for May, so he will present the Raspberry Pi in June.

Chris Irwin will relate his experiences with btrfs, a next-generation file system. He will explore an end-user perspective of the goals, benefits and problems (both solved and created) of this new filesystem.

UPDATE: Here are the slides from Chris's presentation: 2015-04-13-btrfs.pdf