Category: 2021

July: Face Your Daemons

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 14 July 2021

Topic 1/2: systemd: Heresy and Hearsay

Speaker: Tom Ryder

Of all the holy wars for GNU/Linux systems, the dominance of systemd is among the most controversial, with one suite of tightly-coupled software tools taking over so much of the system above the kernel. Being deeply unpopular in traditionalist Unix circles for his systemd apologia, Tom will attempt to explain himself for holding his more nuanced position.

Tom is a bearded chap, and hacks facing black screens with white writing for Inspire Net…a fan of Vim, and tappy-tappy over clicky-clicky.

PLUG Vice President John Flower’s succinct biography

Topic 2/2: Docker and WSL in Windows

Speaker: John Eyres

John Eyres will demonstrate the use of Docker and WSL in Windows with VSCode, continuing on Nick’s WSL topic from last month.

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June: Linux on Windows and Booting from the Cloud

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 9 June 2021

Topic 1/2: WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Speaker: Nick Skarott

WSL is the Windows Subsystem for Linux, a way to run not only console based Linux applications but also now GUI Linux applications on a Windows 10 host. Nick will walk through the setup and demo its capabilities.

Topic 2/2: Practical PXE boot

Speaker: Stephen Worthington

Bring your laptops! Stephen brings us a Part 2 to PXE booting—run a Linux distro on your machine tonight—without it even touching the hard drive—over a live network!

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May: OhMyZsh and Gemini

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 12 May 2021

Topic 1/2: Competitive Programming—OhMyZSH

Speaker: Tim-Hinnerk Heuer

A short introduction to becoming effective with OhMyZSH with a focus on competitive programming with C++. This will be free-form, so contributions are welcome. I’ll show you how you can become effective with CP on websites such as HackerRank, LeetCode and CodeChef using nothing but the shell, Vim, and the websites. You’ll need to be very proficient with a programming language for competitive programming. I would recommend C++ and Python as the two languages of choice, but you can use a lot of languages such as JavaScript, Java, and many more.

Hopefully we can all learn something in this session and most importantly—have fun.

Topic 2/2: Gemini

Speaker: Giovanni Moretti

Gemini is a new internet protocol which:

– Is heavier than gopher
– Is lighter than the web
– Will not replace either
– Strives for maximum power to weight ratio
– Takes user privacy very seriously

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
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March: rsync and Quasar

Date
7pm, Wednesday, 10 March 2021

Topic 1/2: rsync

Speaker: Tom Ryder

You’d think copying files between two different machines would be a relatively simple task, but it’s fraught with all sorts of subtlety and wastefulness. The rsync tool changed everything—fast, efficient, accurate file copies, right down to preserving file permissions, compressed transfer, and differential transfer—transferring only changed data. Tom will provide an introduction to command‐line rsync and a treatment of a couple of applications using it: the Grsync GUI, and the Dirvish backup system.

Topic 2/2: Quasar

Speaker: William Bell

William will demonstrate projects with the Quasar VueJS JavaScript
framework, and how to use it with Docker.

Continue reading “March: rsync and Quasar”