Past Meetings

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.
* * *

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

* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

Just in time to miss tax season, this month's meeting will feature two presentations on free-software accounting systems:

- John Kerr and/or Brent Clements will present GnuCash, a graphical double-entry bookkeeping system.

- For those who find GUIs too intimidating, Chris Frey will present ledger, a commandline accounting system that processes text files of your earnings and expenses.

Update: Chris has made his sample ledger file available: 2014-05-demo-ldg.txt (you can rename this to 2014-05-demo.ldg to make it a proper Ledger file).

OpenSCAD is a script-driven, free software 3D CAD modeller that is widely used in the maker and 3D-printing community. Marius Kintel (who happens to be the lead developer of the project) will tell us about OpenSCAD and demonstrate its use.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

It's March! It's March! February has somehow ended! Against all odds, March has somehow arrived! This calls for a celebration: namely our longstanding KWLUG tradition of having a March meeting -- in March, even. Our festivities will include two presentations, at least one of which will be beginner-friendly. John Kerr will tell us about the economics of free software, including how it affects consumers and taxpayers.

This month's other presentation will be about FirefoxOS, a project by the Mozilla Foundation. FirefoxOS extends the trend of building mobile phone OSes named after web browsers (and built on free software). Andrew Cant will tell us more about this project and its status (surprise! You can actually get a phone with FirefoxOS on it in 14 countries, none of which are Canada.)

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This meeting will be beginner-friendly.

John Eddie Kerr will tell us how free software affects consumers and taxpayers.

Andrew Cant will tell us about FirefoxOS, the Mozilla Foundation's attempt to break into the mobile computing operating system space.

Lori Paniak will tell us about Samba, the venerable open-source interoperability suite with Windows systems. He will show us some of the features included in the latest version of Samba, including its ability to serve as a domain controller.
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The host for this meeting was acant.

UPDATE: Because of the blizzard warning tonight, the scheduled presentation on high-availability clusters will be rescheduled, as will the official meeting. Unofficially it appears that some people will be present, so you can come in for an informal meeting if you wish.
* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

I know, I know: sending an email is just like sending a postcard. Like postcards, emails describe happy times and quick notes intended to provoke envy. Like postcards, emails contain joyful pictures of cultural fnord landmarks. Like postcards, emails should always be signed. Since I did not sign this meeting announcement, how do you know that I wrote it? Can you actually be sure that I am sitting on a sunny Nova Scotian beach sipping fruity beverages? Maybe this is all a sham. Maybe some nefarious organization intercepted this meeting announcement and inserted unwholesome messages? It's enough to provoke existential angst.

Fortunately, this month Bob Jonkman will demonstrate ways to prove that we actually exist. In particular, he will fnord show us the hows and whys of encrypting emails with GPG and the Enigmail plugin for Thunderbird. He will reveal the secrets of why to encrypt email, how cryptography works, and how he manages to communicate with Alice.

If you are already a keysigning wizard then Bob would like you to participate in the formal keysigning party he is running for the evening. If you are a keysigning newbie who can struggle through the keysigning instructions, then Bob would also like you to participate in the party. He has put together a Party Protocol document here:

http://sobac.com/wiki/index.php/Formal_Keysigning

I don't know why you should believe me when I write this, but in other news there are a couple of opportunities to learn scripting and programming this month:

• On Dec 4, Stephen Paul Weber is running a shell-scripting class targetted at "absolute beginners". Admission is free (with donations to Kwartzlab appreciated) and open to the public, but you might want to contact Stephen to make sure there is a spot for you. You can find more details here:
  http://kwartzlab.ca/pipermail/discuss_kwartzlab.ca/2013-November/001941…
• On Dec 7, the Hackademy people are running an "Introduction to Python Programming" course, which is notable because frequent KWLUG presenter Raul Suarez (and onetime presenter Kareem Shehata) will be leading the course. As with other Hackademy courses, this class costs money, but if the cost is an issue there are scholarships available. Visit http://hackademy.ca for more info.

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Bob Jonkman will walk us through the steps of encrypting our own email. In addition he is organizing a formal keysigning party, so that you can increase the trust around your own GPG keys.
* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

Charles McColm will tell us about his XBMC home theatre system. He writes: "At home we use XBMC to
play ripped media, Internet content, content from other devices (iPad and Android phone) as well as streaming audio and video to those devices (centralized media collection)." In this presentation he will show us how he set up this functionality.

Sarah Harvey will talk to us about the importance of security and privacy. Here is an abstract from a similar talk she gave for the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo:

Recent media coverage has brought to light the presence of various government agencies' surveillance programs, along with the possible interference of governments in the establishment and development of standards and software. This brings to question of just how much we need to be concerned about the security and privacy of our information.

Update: Sarah has made her slides available in PDF, PPTX formats.

In this talk we will discuss what all this means in technological and social contexts, examine the status quo, and consider the long-standing implications. This talk assumes no background knowledge of security or privacy, nor any specific technical background.

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The host for this meeting was acant.

Would you like to learn programming, but worry about starting from
scratch? Perhaps you know a young person who would like to program,
but whose typing skills are not yet up to scratch?

Is the desire to create easy, interactive animations an itch you would like to scratch? Or perhaps you have been possessed by Old Scratch? If so (or even if not) then you might be interested in this month's KWLUG presentation. Raul Suarez will introduce us to Scratch, a graphical, introductory programming language designed for children, but usable by anybody. Scratch makes it easy to incorporate animations, graphics and sound into projects. The language allows programmers to piece together program flow constructs (if statements, loops...) by piecing together graphical units. Raul will show us the programming environment, and scratch beneath the surface to demonstrate some interesting programs. He invites our younger KWLUG members (seven years older and up) to attend, with appropriate adult supervision.

In other news, the planning bureaucracy at KWLUG world headquarters is getting anxious, because they still have empty slots for meetings that are quickly approaching. There are still presentation slots available for November (a 40-minute half slot) and December (a full slot, or two half slots). Do you have a topic you would like to share with the KWLUG community? Would you like to help some faceless bureaucrats sleep easier at night? Then get in touch and make a presentation pitch!

In other other news, the Computer Science Club at the University of Waterloo is putting on a neat series of talks related to privacy and computer security. The first one is scheduled for October 8, and is entitled "Why Should You Care About Security and Privacy". For more information, check out the CSC events listings: http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/events/

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This presentation will be beginner-friendly. He writes:

Remember when you started to program? The pleasure of the instant gratification.
Do you want to share that high with a new generation? Expose them to Scratch. Scratch is a visual language born at the MIT, from the same roots as the now defunct App Inventor.

From sequential instructions to conditionals and loops in an event driven environment, the "programmer" gets instant gratification of watching things happening in the screen.

NOTE: Scratch is cross platform FLOSS, so non-Linux users can go home and play with it too!

Raul invites children 8 years old and up (maybe precocious 7 year olds) to attend this presentation as well (accompanied by an adult, please).

* * *

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. We are also registered as an official satellite celebration for the GNU 30th Anniversary Celebration.

The celebrations will be held at Kwartzlab, at 33 Kent Street in Kitchener, from 10am-4pm.

For more information check out our wiki page at http://wiki.softwarefreedomday.org/2013/Canada/Kitchener/Kwartzlab. 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.

Here is a poster you can print if you would like to help spread the word: sfd-2013-poster-v2.pdf

For some reason, those of us in the Free Software world love to become partisan about software alternatives. GNOME vs KDE, vi vs emacs, BSD vs Linux, Drupal vs Wordpress... the list goes on and on. We pick our sides and fight off challengers, even though we are all
working towards the same ends and should really be allies. Can't we all just get along? If we're going to be partisan, why not be partisan over rational things, such as sports teams?

Another pair of contenders has entered the fray, vying for the title of "most awesome next generation fileysystem". The venerable ext2/ext3/ext4 series of filesystems on Linux have fended off many (sometimes technologically-superior) challengers, and remains the default filesystem on many Linux distributions to this day. But filesystems have progressed a lot since ext2 was developed, and its days as the system default are likely numbered.

In the one corner is ZFS, the file system originally developed for Solaris by Sun Microsystems (back when there was a Sun Microsystems). ZFS is more prominent in the BSD world, but it has been ported to Linux as an unofficial kernel module, and some people use it in the wild. Lori Paniak is one of those people, and he will share some of the ZFS story with us, focussing on the interesting tale of how the porting was implemented.

In the other corner is btrfs (pronounced "Butter-FS"), a next generation filesystem native to the Linux kernel. Although btrfs is still under development it is already supported on several distros, including some enterprise ones. First-time KWLUG presenter Gary Cameron will discuss what btrfs has to offer. These presentations will begin at 7pm.

In other news, Software Freedom Day is a go for this year! We will hold our celebrations a week later than everybody else -- on Saturday, September 28, from 10am-4pm, at Kwartzlab (33 Kent St, at the corner of Kent and Charles). You are all invited, and people you know who might not be as familiar with the Free Software movement and why it matters are doubly invited.

Two themes have emerged from this year's SFD organizing. The first is multimedia: a number of presentations will deal with creating
(Blender) and organizing (XBMC, MediaGoblin) multimedia files. The second theme is GNU: this year marks the 30th anniversary of the operating system userland that most of us use every day. It is easy to ignore the GNU in GNU/Linux, so during this Software Freedom Day celebrations we will give GNU its due.

For more information about Software Freedom Day please visit http://www.theworkingcentre.org/sfd . To help out, contact sfd@theworkingcentre.org

Live dents from the meeting, by Bob Jonkman

* * *
Lori Paniak will tell us about the ZFS file system. In particular he will discuss its implementation on Linux. He writes: "It is a nice story involving government sponsored open-source projects, nuclear weapons, software licensing issues and supercomputers."

Gary Cameron will tell us about btrfs, a next-generation filesystem being developed in the Linux kernel. It supports many features, including built-in redundancy, quick snapshots, and file compression.
* * *

The host for this meeting was acant.

Note: Because of the Civic Holiday this meeting will be held on the second Monday in August.

This month's presentations will be beginner-friendly.

It's August, and the living is languid. Many user groups (but not us!) have taken the summer off. The festivals are making their circuits; people are taking their vacations, and those of us at work are not getting much done. (oops. Did I just incriminate myself?) People are relaxing and laying back.

Meanwhile, Raul Suarez has a lot on his mind. He likes to lighten his summer load by mapping and organizing his thoughts, and he uses mind mapping software to do so. In this presentation he will use FreeMind (and possibly other tools) so that you can free your mind too.

During the hot summer months, Jim Kelsh likes to chill, but it is difficult to keep your cool sitting in a roomful of computers blowing hot air. Jim has consolidated his operating systems: first converting his Windows 7 laptop installation into a virtual hard disk, and then running that virtualized installation on Ubuntu. He will take us through those steps in his talk.

It feels way too early to start organizing fall events, but September is approaching quickly, and with it comes Software Freedom Day, which is officially being held on September 21 and perhaps unofficially on September 28. KWLUG has helped organize Software Freedom Day events for the past several years, and it would be nice to do so again -- but in order to make it happen, we need volunteers. There is work to be done in organizing the day (talks, installfests, and maybe other events like BBQs), doing publicity to reach out to people who may not know much about Free Software, offering talks and presentations, and lots more. Can you help out? If so, please contact sfd@theworkingcentre.org .

... and that's it for this month's lackadaisical installment of "Remind everybody of the KWLUG meeting this month."

* * *
This meeting will be beginner-friendly.

Raul Suarez uses mind-mapping software to organize his ideas. He writes:

If you sometimes have ideas to organize, presentations to prepare, trips to
plan, a book to write; and cannot keep  all those thoughts on the top of your
head head, you may would benefit from capturing and categorizing those thoughts
using mind mapping software.

For several years I have been using FreeMind for these, and many other tasks
and can give a "user level" - hands on - presentation of mind mapping software.

Jim Kelsh uses virtualization. He writes:

If you own a laptop or desktop that came installed with Windows 7 but you want to run Linux as well, you usually have several ways to do this.

1. You can dual boot Windows and Linux.
   - this means physically partitioning your computer hard drive and installing Linux “beside” Windows. At boot time, you see a menu that allows you to choose which system you want to boot into.
2. You can replace your Windows OEM installation with Linux and run a program called WINE (WINE Is Not An Emulator), or its commercial counterpart Crossover, which will run some Windows software applications.
3. You can leave Windows as the only operating system, and install your Linux system into a virtualization program, such as Virtualbox from Oracle.

Each solution will work, but you may have some issues.

For example, if you keep Windows as a physical operating system on your computer (solutions 1. or 3.), you are allowing it to control your hardware. If it gets a virus or other serious malware, you may have to reinstall Windows, which can put your computer out of commission for hours.
Or, if Windows decides to restart itself automatically in the middle of a time sensitive on line transaction (after an update that was running in the background and was not visible, true story) you may be very upset!

If you use solution 2., WINE, some newer users find it difficult to set up and WINE and Crossover do not support (yet) all Windows applications.

This presentation will show you how to (legally) convert your Windows OEM installation, without an install disc, into a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk), replace your Windows OEM installation with Ubuntu Linux and run Windows inside Ubuntu using Virtualbox.

And the best part: you don't have to break the bank. I am running this type of setup on a $379.00 Asus laptop from 2012 with $30.00 of extra RAM added.

* * *

The host for this meeting was LPaniak.

Surprise! Another government surveillance revelation has hit the news. We have further confirmation that the companies to which we entrust our email and social networks are perfectly willing to let the US government snoop as well. Or maybe this is no surprise, because privacy is -- if not dead -- in hospice care and we should all rejoice. Only those who are doing something wrong have anything to hide, right?

Not everybody has gotten the memo. There are still those who believe in privacy online, and some of those people are working to build internet infrastructure that is secure by default. One such project is TOR, aka "The Onion Router". This project attempts to anonymize network communications, so that servers are unable to identify the identities of clients that access them. In this month's KWLUG presentation, Steve Palmateer will tell us about the TOR project, focusing on the technical aspects of the project, and demonstrating how to set up a TOR relay from start to finish.

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Stephen Palmateer will tell us about Tor, the Onion Router. He will focus on the technical aspects of the project, and will walk through setting up a Tor relay from start to finish.