[kwlug-announce] Meeting Monday: Appgen, UbuntuTV

[Paul Nijjar]

I'm sure you've heard it before: nobody makes money from Linux. It's
free! And therefore noncommercial! In different ways, this month's
presentations illustrate just how commercial Linux can be.

First up is old Linux commercialization: Appgen, which produces a
proprietary Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system that has both
Linux backends and frontends. William Park uses this system at his
workplace, and he finds aspects of Appgen's implementation interesting
enough to speak about them. Assuming we get connectivity working
properly, he will demonstrate the system, and show us some aspects of
Appgen's underlying data structures. 

Our other presentation is commercial in two ways: it's a product
intended for purchase and use in television sets, and it's about
television, which always involves commercials. Darcy Casselman will
give us a quick tour of Ubuntu's UbuntuTV initiative, which is
Canonical's attempt to leverage its Unity interface for the television
and PVR market. Despite being commercial (sold to hardware
manufactures) the bulk of this project is licenced under the GPL and
LGPL. 

Our FLOSS Fund nominees this month are PhotoRec and TestDisk. Although
these utilities are not widely known, they are kind of amazing.
TestDisk can find lost/destroyed/deleted partitions on your hard disk
and recreate them. PhotoRec can recover specific files from your hard
drives largely independent of filesystem. Despite its name, this
software can recover more than photos -- it currently supports more
than 390 file extensions. You can learn more about these utilities at
http://www.cgsecurity.org/ , and you can donate to these projects at
the meeting or by getting in touch with me. 

With some trepidation, many of us are looking forward to the next LTS
release of Ubuntu, codenamed Precise Pangolin. (Man. Websearches for
"broken error message precise" are going to be awkward.) As is his
custom, Darcy and the Ubuntu Canada people are throwing a release
party scheduled for Saturday, April 28 at Kwartzlab. Volunteers and
cake will be on hand to help you get Ubuntu 12.04 installed on your
general computation device of choice. 

And that's it for this belated meeting announcement, other than
telling you where to go: 

St John's Kitchen
97 Victoria Street North
(Corner of Victoria and Weber) 
Kitchener

Meetings start at 7pm (although helpers to get the space set up are
welcome to come for 6:30pm or so). There is some free parking
available in the Worth a Second Look parking lot, and lots of bike
parking available along the side of the building. Maps and pictures of
the location are available at http://kwlug.org/locations

- Paul
-- 
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org