[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: LinuxMCE

[Paul Nijjar]

Ah, January. Flowers are not poking their gentle heads out of their
beds. Birds are not twittering in the trees. Warm sunshine does not
stream through our windows. Instead, it's grey, cold, slushy,
salt-encrusted and slippery. We leave for work/school in the dark and
come home in the dark. Except for extra poundage and massive credit
card debt, our Christmas festivities are long forgotten. We skimp on
grocery money to pay the extra heating bills. A lonely heap of broken
and abandoned New Year's resolutions are piled in a heap in the
corner. January isn't for living. January is for hibernating away.

Unlike the woodland animals we are not allowed to sleep our Januarys
away. Thank goodness we have a KWLUG meeting to look forward to.  Not
only will this month's meeting infuse our lives with meaning, but it
will also help us indulge our cocooning instincts more efficiently. 
John van Ostrand will tell us about LinuxMCE, a Linux-based distro
that turns a home computer into a full-featured entertainment and
home automation console. LinuxMCE can be used to play movies and TV
shows, make audio streams follow their humans from room to room, act
as a network storage device, and even send voice mail to homeowners
when it detects intruders. As such, it is a competitor to home
entertainment/automation consoles that cost tens of thousands of
dollars to install. Best of all, it is intended to be easy to set up
and use even for those with little to no Linux background. John will
tell us about his LinuxMCE adventures starting at 7:00pm. 

There are no pre-meeting activities planned for this meeting,
although the space will be open for casual discussion and
troubleshooting (and casual goodies from the cafe). 

This month's FLOSS Fund nominee is wxWidgets, a multiplatform GUI
toolkit that allows different operating systems to display dialog
boxes using their native widget sets. Sound boring? It isn't:
wxWidgets makes it easier for developers to write "gateway
applications" that we routinely use to demonstrate the virtues of
open source to our friends and neighbours. Some such software
includes the VLC media player, the Audacity sound editor, and the
FileZilla FTP client.  You can make a contribution to this project at
our meeting, online at http://www.wxwidgets.org/support/spi.htm , or
by contacting Andrew (acant at alumni.uwaterloo.ca) to make donation
arrangements. 

We'll be curling up for the meeting at the usual den: 

The Working Centre
43 Queen Street South 
Kitchener 
(Between King and Charles Streets) 

Maps and photos of the location are on the KWLUG webpage. The Working
Centre is a block away from the Kitchener Transit Terminal, and there
is free car parking in the back lot after 6pm (and free toboggan
parking at the yellow bike rack always). 

- Paul





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