The state of free and open source software

It is over 25 years since Richard Stallman set up the Free Software Foundation and Intel commissioned Michael Tiemann to write the first open source software and less than 25 years since Linus Torvalds issued the first version of Linux and Berkeley Systems Department issued the first version of Unix to run on PCs. Yet today, these operating systems dominate computing in super computers, space exploration, scientific computing, digital televisions, smartphones and Internet services and are gradually being taken up by motor vehicle manufacturers and the creators of household equipment and gadgets. Only on the desktop and in medical devices has free and open source software not made significant inroads.

October 20 2014: BarCamp Manchester, GPIO, GIMP and permissions

After a period of general chat Brian talked about his visit to the BarCamp Manchester where he had given two talks and heard an interesting talk about building a house with straw bales; it needs to be rendered with lime and have stakes to support it.

September 15 2014: Sixth Birthday, HTML and CSS and British Science Festival

After we had cut the cake John did a review of 2013–2014 suggesting, among other things, that people who had not already done so should take a look at the IT Stuff website.

This led into a discussion of security, passwords and the iCloud breach.

CiviCRM: managing volunteers and much more

Businesses have lots of Customer Relations Management software to choose from; the voluntary sector has one, tailored for the needs of voluntary organisations from the outset. Unlike most similar software, it is not a free-standing program but runs as an extension to Drupal (for which it was originally designed), Joomla or Wordpress. Moreover, you can select the components of CiviCRM that you need. So you don’t have to burden yourself installing features that you are never likely to need.

August 18 2014: Introduction to Linux, A computer called LEO and snooping

John H summarised his experiences of the Linux Foundation LFSx101: Introduction to Linux course.

David C reminded people not to forget that the function keys on their devices sometimes control whether hardware is or is not available for use.

Brian warned people that the permissions relating to SD cards have changed in KitKat.

IT Stuff website

IT Stuff now has its own dedicated website where you can find full details of recent programmes.

July 21 2014 Slackware at 21 and snooping (again)

David S celebrated Slackware’s 21st birthday with a slide presentation in which he pointed out that, among other things, it:

• has maintained more of BSD’s traditions
• continues to flourish without a major backer
• is simple to install — all dependencies in the core distro have been satisfied
• is compiled for reliability
• has a Core Team, mostly of volunteers
• has support provided by LinuxQuestions.org
• has community repositories hosted on SlackBuilds.org
• has a documentation project.

June 16th 2014 Art, Encryption and Aviation

Without our regular note taker present, the minutes from June’s meeting is a little lacking.  We spoke about Leeds Art Crawl, Flight Radar, Truecrypt, and secure VoIP whilst attempting to install Android on an EePC (and getting slightly further in doing so than WYLUG).

May 19th 2014 CLI discoveries and No place to hide

Brian presented a number of recent discoveries:

• powertop which marks as ‘bad’ processes where power consumption can be reduced
• reptyr which allows you to transfer a running process from one parent to another
• screen which, after you have run it, allows you to do what you want, log out and, when you log in, restore the screen with screen -r
Read more ...

March 17th 2014 Manchester Space Programme, Pi Nest, G-BJVT and the strange tale of systemd

Shi brought in the first edition of Linux Voice.

John H did a brief history of MIME Types in response to a question at an earlier session and then

David B introduced the Manchester Space Programme using the slides which had been used at the 27 February 2014 launch. MADLAB has considerably expanded and Makerspace has moved to new premises.