Past Meetings

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

Colin Knapp will discuss Gitlab, an online git repository.

Tim Laurence will first learn about and then present Docker, the platform that allows people to deploy software inside application containers.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Nathan Fish will discuss the importance of choosing the right license for software you write or modify, and some guidelines for doing so.

Khalid Baheyeldin will share some of his adventures flashing an Acer A500 tablet with OmniROM. He will walk us through the process of upgrading his tablet from the stock (outdated) Android version installed by the vendor to a more recent third party ROM. He found that his 2.5 year old tablet became faster as a result.

UPDATE: Khalid's slides are here and Nathan's are here.

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The host for this meeting was acant.

Important! Our usual meeting space is under renovations this month, so this month's meeting will be held at a different Working Centre location:

The Working Centre
58 Queen Street South
(near the corner of Charles and Queen)
Kitchener

Sorry for the last minute notice.

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Joe Wennechuk will tell us about the Ansible change management system, which focuses on simplicity, ease of use, security, and reliability.

Tim Laurence will tell us about Puppet, including an overview of change management systems in general.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Khalid Baheyeldin went on an epic journey to set up "The Cloud" in his home, building virtual machines for testing and development.

In this presentation, he shares what he has learned, including the use of virt-install, virsh, virt-top and virt-viewer. His presentation will focus on commandline tools for creating, deploying, and managing virtual machine servers.

Update: Khalid has posted his slides on his website. We have mirrored the slides locally as well.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Bob Jonkman and Jeff Smith will join forces and discuss two "self-hosted" cloud storage options: OwnCloud and the integrated "private cloud" services available on Synology NAS devices.

Video from this presentation is now available: https://archive.org/details/kwlug-cloud-storage-shootout-2014-10-06
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Join us as we celebrate Software Freedom Day.

This year the Kitchener-Waterloo celebrations will feature a number of presentations related to the creation and organization of multimedia, some free culture and free software giveaways, and snacks.

The celebrations will be held at The Working Centre, at 58 Queen Street South and 43 Queen Street South, from 10am-4pm.

For more information check out our wiki page at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2014/Canada/Kitchener/TWC. You can also visit the main Software Freedom Day site.

In addition to attendees, volunteers and sponsors are welcome. Contact sfd at theworkingcentre.org to get in touch.

Adam Glauser will show us some arcana related to XBMC, including setting up remote controls with LIRC and configuring launchers.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Khalid Baheyeldin will show us how he uses the OpenWrt router distribution to track bandwidth use in his home. He will show us what tools are available to inspect his network's traffic, how he customized those tools to report usage per device, and how he keeps history by hour, day and month.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

NOTE: the High Availability talk has been put on hiatus again. Our apologies for this.

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This month's meeting will consist of some short, informal talks:

- Khalid Baheyeldin will discuss his adventures in getting free HD TV using an antenna.
- Tim Laurence will share "10 reasons Linux sucks!"
- Brian Bentley and Bob Jonkman will share their adventures in evangelizing Linux to the Bits and Bytes Computer Club
- Paul Nijjar will talk about the process of putting together the KWLUG podcast.

Update: Here are slides and slide sources from Paul's talk.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

Tim Laurence will tell us about AppArmor. He writes:

AppArmor promises to provide easy to use application security.

What does it do? How do you bend it to your will? Why should you care?

Tim thinks AppArmor is pretty neat. He will explain what is all about and show just how easy it can be to use.

Update: here are the slides and demofiles from Tim's talk: 2014-06-AppArmorTalk.tgz

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The host for this meeting was acant.