Jim Kelsh will demonstrate how to install Linux on a laptop. He may cover different installation methods and different distributions. This presentation is intended to be friendly to beginners to Linux.
Update: Jim's slides are here: 2018-03-05-linux-installation.odp
Charlie Drage will discuss his work (and contributions) to Kubernetes.
Mary Loubele will lead an interactive demonstration of how to use Elasticsearch to visualize the Twitter API. Bring your laptop loaded with VirtualBox. You will also need a Twitter login to access the API.
To participate, please follow these instructions: http://loubele.org/instructions.pdf
The virtual machine for you to download is here: http://loubele.org/Elastic.ova
The demonstration will cover the following topics:
Update: Unfortunately, Joe had a serious personal situation come up, and won't be able to present this evening. There will still be a meeting but the topic is too be announced. In the worst case we will host a roundtable discussion. Our apologies for the last minute change.
Update: We had a roundtable discussion.
Note: We have shifted this meeting a week forward. Cory Doctorow will be giving a talk on Dec 4 at the University of Waterloo, and there is some chance that tickets will be made available to the public. In this case many KWLUG members would prefer to attend that talk rather than this meeting.
Doug Moen will tell us about Curv, a 3D modelling language he is developing for making art using mathematics. Jonathan Fritz will tell us about his work on Mattermost, an open-source alternative to Slack.
Doug writes:
Curv is an open source 3D solid modelling language, oriented towards 3D printing, procedurally generated art, and mathematical visualization. It's a pure functional language where geometric shapes are first class values, and are constructed by transforming and combining simpler shapes using an unusually rich collection of operators.
Instead of polyhedral meshes or other boundary representations, Curv represents shapes as pure functions (Function Representation or F-Rep). This is a volumetric representation, where a function maps every point (x,y,z) in 3D space onto the properties of a shape. This representation is powerful, supporting a wide range of shape operators, and is a good match to the volumetric nature of 3D printing.
F-Rep is well suited to being directly rendered by a GPU. To achieve this, Curv code is compiled into GPU shader programs or compute kernels.
Jon writes:
Mattermost is an open source alternative to popular enterprise chat applications like Slack, HipChat, and Microsoft Teams. It can be used on the web, your desktop, or your mobile device. The project is MIT-licensed, with an enterprise version available for paid customers that need additional functionality.
Note: This visit is being organized by the University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science;, as part of their 50th anniversary celebrations, but the organizers have kindly opened the evening talk to the general public as well as the UW community.
Blogger, activist and author Cory Doctorow will be giving two events in Kitchener-Waterloo on Monday, December 4.
Lori Paniak will describe a project he worked on at the University of Waterloo. He writes:
The University of Waterloo School of Computer Science (SCS) recently undertook a project to provide several hundred TB of redundant, multi-building distributed high-performance storage for SCS users and infrastructure use. The first part of this talk will recount the non-linear trajectory of the project from the formulation of goals through to the delivered Ceph system.
The design of this system allows for the modular addition of services utilizing the storage. The first such service, SCS Nextcloud, provides a DropBox-like functionality across all popular client platforms. We will give details of a high-availablity implementation of Nextcloud built using haproxy and containers.
Khalid Baheyeldin has been dabbling in a new hobby: amateur astronomy. In this talk he will share some of the surprisingly capable open source software he has found for astronomy, and has been using. This includes: planetarium applications, drivers for telescope control, astrophotography, astrometry, object databases, and more.
Tim Laurence will talk about "How to ruin your life using shell scripts".
Andrew Cant has been playing with JOSM, the Java-based OpenStreetMap editor. He will discuss his experiences thus far.
Bob Jonkman has been playing with the FusionPBX frontend to the telephony system FreeSWITCH. He was asked to set up a telephone conference and was surprised at how easy it was. In this presentation he will lead a live demo of the system. Bring your smartphone or laptop to be part of the demo.
Having recovered from his illness, Theo Belaire will deliver his long-awaited Rust presentation.
Rust is a new systems language designed by Mozilla, who are using it to develop their next generation browser. What else could it be used for?
Theo Belaire will describe his experiments using Rust for low level kernel code, building a Linux module and developing a time operating system. In the process he will review the basics of the language and what benefits it can give low-level developers.
Update: The digital literacy and inclusion talk had to be postponed. Stay tuned for rescheduling details.
Nathan Fish will tell us about the configuration management system SaltStack. He will give us an overview of configuration management, show us the components of SaltStack, lead us through some examples, and offer troubleshooting advice.
Bob Jonkman will demonstrate the XMPP setup he uses for the KW VoIP group.
* * *
Aden Seaman will give us an introduction to functional programming.
He will cover the following topics:
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.
Also this month: we will look at donated routers. We will match them up to power supplies, test them and see whether we can install OpenWRT on them.
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.
Having recovered from his germ attack, Mark Steffen will give us a talk on OSSIM, an open source SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) system. Mark says that this system is appropriate for small organizations or paranoid home users. He will cover the following topics:
Jason Eckert will revisit his KW Linuxfest talk with a brief history of Linux and open source. It promises to be a fun and interesting talk about where the Linux operating system came from, why it succeeded, and how Open Source has shaped technology today and how it will continue to do so in the future.
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.
Update: Theo has also been attacked by germs, and he will likely not make this meeting. We will reschedule this presentation and hold a roundtable instead, or fill in an emergency presentation. Watch this space.
Update 2: Theo is not feeling up to giving his Rust presentation, so we will hold a roundtable. We will reschedule the Rust presentation.
* * *
The host for this meeting was acant.
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.
UPDATE: Unfortunately Mark was attacked by germs over the weekend, and won't be able to present today. His OSSIM presentation has been deferred.
Joff Voskamp will also review his recent experience with Let's Encrypt SSL certificates to secure his websites. He will describe the groups background, how the certificates work, and demonstrate how he is using it.
At the last minute, Jason Zvaniga has heroically volunteered to give a short introduction to cryptocurrencies and the Canada eCoin Project.
A few quick points:
Year in Review:
Cert in Brief:
Let's encrypt went to public beta in December 2015.
Features:
Annual budget for 2017 is expected to be about $2M (USD)
See also:
Interested in helping:
Jason has posted his slides at https://f9ekkdjyuja1sh4cel2o.koad.sandcats.io/index.html#/
The second annual KW Linux Fest is happening Saturday, January 28 at 200 Bathurst Drive in Waterloo. The day will feature a number of speakers. Doors open at 9am, and the first talk starts at 9:30am.
Admission is $5.
Register for the conference by visiting http://kwlinuxfest.ca.
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.
