Past Meetings

The doors open for conversation, networking and casual Q&A some time between 6 and 6:30. Formal meeting and presentations start at 7:00pm sharp.

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Chris Frey will give us an overview of the git revision control system. He will take the fear out of git by explaining:

• the low level mechanics
• git's philosophy and workflow
• how to get started with a _few_ basic commands
• how git uses the network
• show some cool things that can be done, to stimulate further pursuit
• where to get more information
• if there's time, how to use git with other SCMs

The doors open for conversation, networking and casual Q&A some time between 6 and 6:30. Formal meeting and presentations start at 7:00pm sharp.

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KWLUG members will give a number of quick (30 minute or less) demonstrations of assorted Linux goodies.

- Richard Weait will answer the question: "What Linux Distro Should I Use?"

- Rob Day will give a whirlwind tour of the steps involved in compiling kernels.

- John van Ostrand will give a presentation about DSL and houshold telephone wiring. He writes: "The presentation will be a brief discussion of the typical household telephone wiring and how to work with it with regards to DSL. I'll cover a few different termination blocks (demarc points) and how to work with them. I'll talk about the tools used to work with telephony lines. I'll talk about how houses are wired and how to alter that wiring to put a DSL filter on the whole household."

- Paul will give an introduction to GNU Screen, a program which manages multiple command-line windows effectively. Paul will cover basic usage and some configuration tricks like title bars and automatic window labelling that make Screen much more informative (and pleasant) to use.

Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com will give a presentation on the the MySQL database.

MySQL is a popular and free database management system used in many applications, and by many web sites.

• Relational databases and SQL
• What is MySQL?
• History of MySQL?
• Who is using MySQL?
• Advantages and disadvantages
• The plethora of MySQL engines
• The MyISAM and InnoDB engines
• Creating a database
• Creating tables
• Inserting, retrieving and deleting data
• Backup, replication and repair
• The future of MySQL

The slides from the presentation are now here.

Note that April 5 is Easter Monday, so this meeting will be on April 12.

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Virtualization systems allows your computer to run more than one operating system at the same time. KVM is a Hypervisor -- the main part of a virtualization system -- included in the Linux Kernel. Chris Irwin will show us what virtualization is, as well as how and why to use KVM, QEMU, and libvirt on Linux.

This presentation is suitable for those new to virtualization and curious about it as well as those with moderate virtualization experience.

Update: Here are a tarball of the presentation slides.

Presentation topics covered ...

• What is Virtualization?
• What is QEMU?
• What is KVM?
• What is libvirt?
• Do I need anything else?
• How do I run all this?
• What can I do with it?
• How Does this compare with other solutions (e.g. VMWare, VirutalBox, and Xen).

The March 2010 KWLUG meeting will have all of your favorite activities. New attendees are welcome and we'll have informal Q&A from arrival time until the presentation starts at 7pm. You'll learn everything that there is to know about regular expressions Afterwards we'll adjourn to a local restaurant for further discussion and refreshments. There is no fee to attend KWLUG meetings and everybody with an interest in Linux, Free Software, Software Libre, Open Source Software and flightless waterfowl in formalwear are welcome to attend.

NOTE: This meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North Kitchener, at the corner of Weber and Victoria. Use the door on the left / North side of the building. We meet on the second floor. Doors will open around 6:30pm.

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You search text every day, often many times. Although much of that may be Internet searches, there are still lots of places to use the pattern matching power of Regular Expressions.

The cryptic looking regular expressions are usually quite simple. This presentation will help you understand the most commonly used features of regular expressions and will cover the most commonly used tools and a couple of programming languages.

So whether you are a graphical interface user, command line user, system administrator or programmer you'll find regular expressions useful.

The February 2010 KWLUG meeting will have all of your favorite activities. New attendees are welcome and we'll have informal Q&A from arrival time until the presentation starts at 7pm. Our very own Eric G. will inform and delight us with daring tales of automated installation. Afterwards we'll adjourn to a local restaurant for further discussion and refreshments. There is no fee to attend KWLUG meetings and everybody with an interest in Linux, Free Software, Software Libre, Open Source Software and flightless waterfowl in formalwear are welcome to attend.

NOTE: This meeting will be held at St John's Kitchen 97 Victoria Street North Kitchener, at the corner of Weber and Victoria. Use the door on the left / North side of the building. We meet on the second floor. Doors will open around 6:30pm.

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Eric Gerlach will demonstrate the use of preseeding, PXE booting, local mirrors and other tricks he uses to automate Linux server installations. You will be amazed and delighted by Eric's daring demonstrations of eliminating the mundane aspects of installing a new system while still getting the system you want, the system you need, even the system you deserve. This presentation is suitable for all audiences. If you have ever installed a Linux system, or thought about it, you'll learn something fun.
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The host for this meeting was richard.

NOTE: This meeting will be held at a new location: St John's Kitchen in Kitchener, at the corner of Weber and Victoria. Doors will open around 6:30pm.

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Kyle Spaans will show us the care, feeding and deciphering of the LaTeX typesetting language.

In this presentation I will show how you can remotely access other computers to work as if you were in front of the keyboard or let other people view your desktop or control your computer, even behind firewalls. All using Free software.

The presentation will be at the end user level, showing the practical and hands-on side of it. The presentation is not about explaining the technology, just how to use it.

These are things that I use on daily basis for different purposes, from providing remote tech support to my father that lives in Mexico to using the main home computer when my children are also using it to working from home using the computer at the office to giving presentations remotely and hosting virtual meetings.

This presentation is a teaser of many different technologies and methods that could be full presentations on their own, but with full instructions on how to use each one of them. The technologies presented will include the following

• SSH (Including reverse SSH)/putty
• X over SSH
• VNC (Including reverse VNC and VNC over SSH)/Vino/KRFB
• NX No machine/FreeNX
• Remote Desktop (Terminal services)
• Web conferencing.(OpenMeetings, WebHuddle, DimDim, etc)

I'll do my best to set up a virtual meeting for those of you who cannot attend this presentation in person. I'll confirm if I can do it closer to the scheduled date and if so, post the details.

Edit:\
I've uploaded the presentations to this post and created a series of posts on my blog with more detailed information

Telnet
SSH
Putty
XDMCP
VNC (Virtual Network Computing )
NX
Web conferencing
Installing OpenMeetings on Debian Lenny

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The host for this meeting was Raul Suarez.

This meeting is scheduled to be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo. It will be held in the Heuther boardroom, which is on the third floor of the building. You'll find the boardroom by going up the to second floor, through the bar and up one more flight of stairs.

Join us at 7pm sharp for the presentation. Or join us as early as 6:30 for conversation and questions before the meeting starts.

We'll adjourn to one of the Heuther dining rooms after the presentation for refreshments and further discussion.

* * *
In this presentation, Khalid will go through various tools and techniques used to analyze performance issues with systems running Linux.

We will cover a bit of everything:
- Status tools
- Debugging/profiling, with an emphasis on performance rather than code debugging.
- Monitoring tools
- Statistics tools

We will examine live systems running the above tools where possible, in order to show real life data ...

This meeting is scheduled to be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo. It will be held in the Heuther boardroom, which is on the third floor of the building. You'll find the boardroom by going up the to second floor, through the bar and up one more flight of stairs.

Join us at 7pm sharp for the presentation. Or join us as early as 6:30 for conversation and questions before the meeting starts.

We'll adjourn to one of the Heuther dining rooms after the presentation for refreshments and further discussion.

* * *

Sometimes quick and dirty get the job done. As Perl programmers say "There
is more than one way to do it" and in the case of a finding out why a
program is not doing what you would like to do this is very true. One could
fire up the debugger and dig into the source code but often simpler and
faster methods are available. In the cases where you don't have the source
code these may be all you have. t

Here I will present a certainly incomplete but what I have found to be an
invaluable list of commands and techniques for trouble shooting software of
all kinds under Linux. On other platforms you will find similar commands so
these techniques need not be limited to Linux.

KWLUG is helping celebrate Software Freedom Day. We will have talks, an installfest, and other festivities. You can see more details on the official page .

Please join us and bring a friend!

We can use volunteers as well.

(Yes. This is the same day as Talk Like a Pirate Day. Deal.)

This meeting is scheduled to be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo. It will be held in the Heuther boardroom, which is on the third floor of the building. You'll find the boardroom by going up the to second floor, through the bar and up one more flight of stairs.

Join us at 7pm sharp for the presentation. Or join us as early as 6:30 for conversation and questions before the meeting starts.

We'll adjourn to one of the Heuther dining rooms after the presentation for refreshments and further discussion.

* * *
Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com, Inc, will lead us through an in depth trip for the Apache web server, including:

• Overview of the HTTP protocol that powers the entire world wide web
• Overview of Apache, history, license, who uses it, popularity
• Installation of Apache
• Configuration details for apache
• Overview of some commonly user Apache modules
• Being dynamic (CGI, FastCGI, inline)
• Tips of security
• Discussion, questions, comments

If you want specific Apache related topics covered, please contact Khalid.

Note: The slides from the presentation can be downloaded in PDF format from Presentation: Apache Web Server, KW Linux Users Group.

NOTE: This meeting is scheduled to be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo. It will be held in the Heuther boardroom, which is on the third floor of the building (go up the second floor, through the bar and up one more flight of stairs).

Computers generate a lot of logs. Sometimes the logfiles contain useful information or warnings about your computers, routers, printers and other devices on your network. Reading and understanding all those logs can quickly get overwhelming, but a syslog server can help.

In this presentation Paul will discuss his experiences setting up a syslog server using rsyslog, tenshi and SysLogAgent:

• rsyslog is an update to the syslog daemon that is packaged by default in Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu
• tenshi is a log analysis and summarization program
• SysLogAgent allows you to read logfiles and events from Windows machines and send them to a syslog server

The presentation will cover the principles of syslog servers, some tricks for configuring and debugging them, and some limitations and "future work".

UPDATE: Here are the slides (in PDF format) and slide sources (in LaTeX format) used for the presentation.

NOTE: The meeting location for this month has changed. This month's meeting will be held at the Heuther Hotel in Waterloo. We are meeting in the Boardroom beginning at 7:30.

Khalid will tell us about the LAMP stack, the basis of oodles and oodles of websites that distract and upset us.

Here is a proposed outline of the talk. Should be 1.5 hours or so.

- What is LAMP
- Why LAMP
- Some applications running LAMP (Drupal, Joomla, Zope/Plone, Django)
- Some sites running LAMP (Slashdot, Digg, ...etc.)
- The L we all know and love
- The A and alternates (lighttpd, ngnix)
- The M (MyISAM, InnoDB)
- The Ps (PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby [not a P!]) Focus more on PHP
- Installing LAMP
- Different ways of running PHP
- Performance considerations
- Security considerations

Note: The presentation slides are attached in PDF format below. Thanks to all who attended.
* * *

The host for this meeting was kbahey.

OpenLayers makes it easy to put a dynamic map in any web page. It can display map tiles and markers loaded from any source. MetaCarta developed the initial version of OpenLayers and gave it to the public to further the use of geographic information of all kinds. OpenLayers is completely free, Open Source JavaScript, released under a BSD-style License.

GnuCash is personal and small-business financial-accounting software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows.
... GnuCash allows you to track bank accounts, stocks, income and expenses.

I'll show you how to create accounts, how to import transactions from your bank, Do transfers and generate reports.

GnuCash has a special place for me as it was my epiphany to the value of Open source:

I bought Quicken in 1998 and used it until 2003 when I got a new computer. When I tried to reinstall Quicken it asked me to register. To my surprise the registration didn't work anymore. The URL no no longer existed. The only option was buying the newest version. Needless to say, 5 years of personal expenses records were locked and out of reach unless I forked up the money.

I had "played" with Linux on and off since the early days as a nice curiosity but not until then it did sink what Freedom really means.

Yes, Quicken still has nicer graphics and maybe some advanced features, but putting it on the balance against owning my own data, freedom certainly wins.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

How much disk space do you have? And how much disk space do you need? If you're like me the answers are "not enough" and "more". Our digital age has lead to increasing use of disk space to hold media of all kinds. Our photo album is the computer, our video library is also there and our file cabinet is slowly creeping onto that disk as well. It's all precious data that just continues to grow and grow.

Managing data is becoming a common need for today's households and a burden for companies. It needs to be more simple and less expensive and more reliable than before.

iSCSI is a technology that shares disk devices over Ethernet. Disks shared using iSCSI appear as block devices to clients and can be treated as such. This flexibility in providing disk space to systems is what has been used for years in very expensive corporate data centres. iSCSI is bundled with Linux so this same technology is right at your fingertips.

iSCSI is not a file system, it's a device sharing protocol that has significant possibilities. Imagine all the computers in your house booting from a single disk, without any special O/S requirements.

The presentation starts with a discussion of what iSCSI is and where it can be useful. You'll see real-time demonstrations setting up iSCSI. And you'll be tempted with discussions of advanced configurations.
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The host for this meeting was john.

NOTE: We're back to the old location for this meeting. We are NOT meeting at 58 Queen.

Due to logistical problems we are holding March's meeting in the usual location, 43 Queen Street South.

Also note that the parking situation has changed. The back lot behind 43 Queen is closed, so you can't park there for free after 6pm any more.

Doors open at 6:30pm. Discussion and camaraderie will be had.

Presentation starts promptly at 7pm.

This much-anticipated, long-awaited presentation is certain to be standing room only. Arrive early!

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The OpenWRT project provides the firmware to turn compatible devices including many WRT-series Linksys and Asus WL-series wireless routers into fully-programmable, GNU/Linux operating environments. We use this feature to convert an ASUS WL500g Premium (V.1) wireless router into a Voice over IP (VOIP) gateway using the Asterisk packages provided in the current OpenWRT distribution, Kamikaze.

After a brief overview of VOIP systems in general and setup of the hardware, details to be covered will include: Installing and configuring the Asterisk application to make and receive calls from the VOIP provider Unlimitel, configuring extensions with soft-phones, VOIP phones, ATA-connected telephones and WiFi VOIP clients and setting up voicemail with recorded prompts.

Additional topics to be covered as time allows may include: Voicemail to E-mail, call-forwarding, menu-driven multiple extensions, remote extensions, performance issues with simultaneous VOIP and data transfer, WAN connection options for the router and other unannounced surprises.

Talk details can be found on the crashcourse.ca wiki
* * *

The host for this meeting was LPaniak.

We're trying a new location for the February meeting.

Please note this as we don't want anybody to miss out, just because we've run across the street.

We have The Working Centre at 58 Queen booked for at least February and March. This is "across the street" from the usual location. No change to the time. Join us.

Doors open at 6:30pm. Discussion and camaraderie will be had.

Presentation starts promptly at 7pm.

* * *
Nagios is a well-established network monitoring system that tracks the health of network infrastructure and sends out alerts when things go wrong.

Andrew Cant will share his breathtaking story of implementing Nagios at his workplace, and will dazzle us with by explaining its features and capabilities.
* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

Window managers? Are those the folks who put the fancy clothes on the mannequins down ant the mall?

Not in this case. In computer terms a window manager provides a way for programs to appear on graphical desktops and share decorations for things like check boxes and select lists.

Kyle Spaans will introduce us to several tiling window managers, a subset of the overall window manager kingdom.

* * *
*Cough* Is X making your computer slow? Perhaps moving away from the the "desktop environment" is your solution.

This will be a presentation about tiling window mangers, particularly StumpWM, xmonad, and perhaps dwm if the presenter (our very own Kyle Spaans) can take some time to learn it.

This presentation will consist of quick and dirty demos on how to use and configure these kinds of window managers, and a discussion of their pros and cons. Honorable mention may be made of Fluxbox and FVWM.