Palmerston North Linux Users Group
7pm, Wednesday, 11 September 2024
Speaker: Richard O’Donoghue
Coolify is an open-source and self-hostable platform as a service (PaaS) alternative. Richard will show us how it works.
Speaker: Luke Jones
Luke will walk us through his work making ASUS ROG laptops first-class citizens in the Linux kernel.
7pm, Wednesday, 14 August 2024
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Whether you’re managing an ISP or just a somewhat ambitious home lab, over time it gets difficult to keep track of assets of your network as it expands. The first thing people might think of is keeping track of how all of your IP networks and addresses are assigned—the classic IPAM concept (Internet Protocol Address Management). In NetBox, this concept expands to model many other properties of a network: cable connections, hardware positions in racks, services, virtualization, power…
Tom will demonstrate how to get started with a self-hosted NetBox instance, including the first steps to modeling a simple home lab.
Download slides (application/pdf, 380 KiB)
Speaker: Nick Skarott
Developments in both hardware and software have turned one aspect of our digital worlds into the ultimate tech sector swearword. Nick thinks this is grossly unfair as it has very useful applications when used right. Nick has been looking into one such application of this swearword that is lightweight, unintrusive, and practical.
7pm, Wednesday, 10 July 2024
Speaker: Brendon Green
Brendon will attempt a live install of ReactOS. Following off the success of live installing at plug OpenBSD, Brendon has set to ratchet up the difficulty by atempting a working live install of ReactOS – a ground up open source recreation of the (shudder) Windows kernel.
Speaker: Richard Barlow
Richard will talk about how he runs his backup regime. This will be a brief topic with a large section for Q&A.
$2 gold coin donation
Non alcoholic drinks and biscuits will be provided, but please feel free to bring along your own snacks and drinks.
7pm, Wednesday, 12 June 2024
Last November (2023), we ran lightning talks, shorter technical talks of up to 10 minutes each in length, instead of the usual two longer talks. The feedback for this was really good, so we’re having another go this month. We have the following speakers and topics scheduled, probably in this order:
* Tom Ryder: Shell quotes—download slides (application/pdf, 116 KiB)
* Nick Skarott: Stuff the big three
* Joseph Calkin: What it takes to serve an endpoint
* Richard O’Donoghue: LinuxGSM
* Chris Winkworth: check_mk
* Josh Sunnex: Docker and Wireguard
$2 gold coin donation
Coffee and biscuits will be provided, but please feel free to bring along your own snacks and drinks.
7pm, Wednesday, 8 May 2024
Speaker: Adrian Hayes
Reliable and operational SCSI hard drives for vintage Macintosh computers are getting rarer and harder to find these days. Emulating SCSI hard drives can give your vintage Mac a new lease on life, with a number of modern upgrades available, one being the PiSCSI adapter.
Speaker: Tom Ryder
The GNU core utilities is a suite of command-line tools that do basic file, shell, and text manipulation. A few of them, like ls(1) or cp(1), are among the first and most common commands a GNU/Linux user would use. But how about basename(1), to strip a filename’s path or extension? Or fmt(1), to format text to a given width? Or factor(1), to print the prime factors of a number? Tom will go through some of the lesser-known coreutils programs, and show a bit about what they do, along with a few other tools in the same vein that are usually packaged separately, including bc(1) and units(1).
Hello PLUG members; Steve Pavarno of ManawaTech invites us all to the Mega Meetup in May. Details are:
When: Thu 23rd May 2024, 5:30 pm–8:30 pm NZDT
Where: Victory Venue, 20 Rangitikei Street, Palmerston NorthOur twice-a-year meetup for all the meetups in the city. Tickets are essential as we are nearing venue capacity.
Daniel Merriott, Managing Director at the Digital Skills Agency will talk about mental health in the tech/digital sector post COVID and some steps each of us can take to look after ourselves and each other. We’ll share this through a short interactive game-style session to give us all a fun Thursday evening energy boost.
The Digital Skills Agency focusses on the people in tech – whilst our work is usually centred around capability and skills development, we have the privilege of having 1-on-1 conversations, and leading workshops with many hundreds of IT and digital professionals every year. It’s clear from our conversations and experience that we all need to improve our skills to not just to survive, but to thrive, in an industry that continues to see burnout, stress, anxiety and other mental health issues.
This event includes
- Short interactive presentation on mental health in tech
- Marketplace stands (UCOL, Young Chamber, Network of Skilled Migrants, The Factory, IT Professionals and many more)
- Employment corner: connecting employers and seekers
- Meetup information
- Networking opportunties
- Drinks and nibbles
This is a mostly social event. Come along to make new connections in the local tech scene, meet old friends, and find out whats happening around here.
Attendance costs NZD$10.
Any questions about the event should go to Steve at info@manawa.tech.
7pm, Wednesday, 10 April 2024
Speaker: Nick Skarott
KDE’s Plasma is a known and loved desktop environment for many Linux users. Being relatively clean while being fully featured without much system load, it’s long been a go-to for those who want a well supported environment that’s prettier than XFCE, but faster than GNOME (at least in the presenter’s opinion). Nick went to have a look at the new version of Plasma, while tackling an arch-nemesis head on to see if, once and for all, his most-feared distribution can be tamed.
Speaker: Brendon Green
How hard can it possibly be to install and use OpenBSD in 2024? Let’s find out together. Inspired by xkcd #349.
7pm, Wednesday, 13 March 2024
Speaker: Richard Barlow
Headscale is a re-implemented version of the Tailscale VPN coordination server, developed independently and completely separately. It allows people to use the official Tailscale client with a self-hosted command and control server. It uses the WireGuard protocol.
Download slides (application/pdf, 956 KiB)
Speaker: Giovanni Moretti
Giovanni will show us a few more of his favourite tools:
Download slides (application/pdf, 1.3 MiB)
7pm, Wednesday, 14 February 2024
Speaker: Nick Skarott
The Raspberry Pi is the credit-card sized computer we all know and love. Nick has spent the Christmas break getting to grips with the latest iteration, and what makes the Pi 5 an even bigger upgrade than the previous generation was.
Speaker: Tom Ryder
Web pages staying online has never been very reliable, but over the past few years in particular, link rot has got a lot worse, especially as information centralises onto big proprietary platforms whose providers don’t have much of an interest in keeping things online. The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine can often rescue a page for you, but it can’t capture everything, all the time. What if you could have your own archive of web pages, so you could easily save content exactly as it appears in case it gets taken down, trying multiple methods of saving to do so? This is what ArchiveBox allows. Tom will give a brief demonstration of ArchiveBox for day-to-day personal use.
Download slides (application/pdf, 768 KiB)
It’s been a great year for PLUG, and you’re invited to celebrate with us, with some pizza and good company!
Weather permitting, we will meet at The Esplanade, at the tables near the paddling pool, on Wednesday December 13th, at 6pm.
The weather did not permit! We will instead meet at Milson Community Centre, our usual venue, on Wednesday December 13th, at 6:30pm—note, too, the change of time!
Please bring $10 in cash to contribute to the pizza. Also bring along anything else you’d like to eat.
Family and curious friends are welcome, as always.
We’ll look forward to seeing you all there!
