July 27th 2011 - Distros, Raspberries, and Microsoft

A select group discussed distributions, including Galpon Minino, a Debian based Spanish distribution which will run on old computers and their version for children ( http://gruvi.galpon.org/minino/miscelanea/PicarOS.avi) and the Turkish produced Pardus distro (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viEQ-DWxX50), progress with Raspberry Pi (http://www.raspberrypi.org/), due out in November, and setting up Myth TV.

June 29th 2011 - Open VPN, Truecrypt, Bitcoin...

At last night's meeting we discussed OpenVPN, Truecrypt, Bitcoin and Tomboy Notes.

The slides from the talk on OpenVPN are available from Github, but probably don't make any sense on their own.. We covered the use-cases for OpenVPN, along with discussion on problems setting it up people had encountered and tricks and tips. We also quickly installed a server on the night, so hopefully people feel more comfortable setting it up now.

Tomboy

Tomboy can be used for multiple note taking and then all the separate notes are available, in a list, for you to consult.

Images and photographs

Images, whether graphics, figures or photographs, can be included in almost anything a voluntary organisation produces from newsletters and manuals to a website.

May 25th 2011 - Open source, intellectual property and all that jazz – the MIT licence

Robert concluded his presentation on IP law by looking at US, European and UK law and taking a detailed look at the structure and content of the MIT licence. Members digested the news that Linus is thinking of starting kernel 3.0.0, John summarised where we are with the FOSS articles for Bradford CVS and invited contributions and Nick introduced the Raspberry Pi computer: http://www.raspberrypi.org/

April 27th 2011 - Open source, intellectual property and all that jazz

Robert took us through the first part of his presentation on the legal fiction of IP covering copyright, patents and trademarks pointing out that IP law is framed by lawyers for publishers to maximise investor returns and imposed on consumers, producers and distributors. John then introduced the Cabinet Office survey on open source standards which is very much aimed at integrators rather than individual users and David demonstrated Quantum GIS.

Desktop publishing

Most voluntary organisations need to advertise themselves, publish information or produce newsletters. Often using an Office suite or Microsoft Publisher is enough. But what if these don't give quite the polished finish you want? Enter Scribus.

March 30th 2011 - KDE 2000

John demonstrated KDE 1.2 from 2000 comparing applications as they were in 2000 with what they look like today. Download: KDE 2000 Presentation (.odp 0.8MB) There were some other things we did at that meeting, can you remember what?

Document Freedom Day

Document Freedom Day on March 30th is a celebration of the progress towards a permanent open standard for documents.

February 2011 - IPV6, BGP and BAS

[BAS = Bursting At the Seams] 36 people packed out the meeting last night to hear a really good talk about 'how your mother will never notice' as the internet infrastructure makes the switch from IPV4 to IPV6. Andy Davidson of Hurricane Electric gave the talk, and a demo of their IPV6 Tunnel Broker that people can use to try the IPV6 net. Anyone got any plans to do something locally on World IPV6 Day, 8th June 2011?