April 14th - Building A 3D Printer the Hard Way

2016-03-24

Video Resources

Abstract:

Desktop 3D printing has become fairly popular in the last few years, and affordable printers are flooding the market. But why buy a difficult to hack black box when you could spend weeks sourcing/printing parts, crimping a a bunch of wires, and calibrating a fully open design from the RepRap project?

Aside from the freedom that comes from building your own libre hardware printer, building your own has many advantages that make the effort worth it. Want dual extrusion? Triple, quadruple extrusion even? Or how about pushing the limits by printing clay or icing? Perhaps you'd like a tiny but super fast printer, one you could fold up and fit into a backpack, or a printer with a meter of build height. With a libre hardware printer, you can do all of this -- and far more affordably than purchasing or modifying a closed printer platform.

This talk will cover the advantages (and disadvantages) of building a libre hardware printer with a focus on the popular RepRap Prusa i3 family. Finding the community, selecting one of dozens of designs, sourcing components, and building a printer from scratch can be a harrowing experience -- this talk should provide some orientation in the chaos and make the process easier.

The talk will also cover using a 3D printer with 100% Free Software on GNU/Linux, from designing models (including the printer itself!) to the microcontroller running the printer.

Bio:

Clinton Ebadi is a kilt-wearing, cat-loving, Free Software enthusiast. He's spent most of the last decade volunteering for the Internet Hosting Cooperative and learning way more than anyone should know about OpenAFS. After picking up an Arduino last year to make a few LED strips blink, he found himself borrowing a friend's 3D printer a few months later, and ended up hooked on hardware hacking.


March 10th - Openshift 3 and the next generation of PaaS

2016-02-28

Clayton Coleman is architect and engineer on cloud orchestration and containers at Red Hat, in charge of both technical direction for Kubernetes and OpenShift (Red Hat's platform as a service built on top of Kubernetes) as well as the broader container and container content efforts at Red Hat. Clayton is one of the top contributors to both Kubernetes and OpenShift and has been involved in many projects in the container, platform-as-a-service, and ci/cd ecosystem over the last four years. He enjoys sleeping, but rarely has time to do it anymore.

Abstract:

Containers, Microservices, Continuous Integration and Deployment, and DevOps are the buzzwords of the day. But how do they actually help make it easier to build and run software? How do container-as-a-service systems like Kubernetes, Mesos, or Docker Swarm change how software is deployed?

In this talk I'll cover how all of these topics come together, how they can benefit developers and operators, and how we've built a platform (OpenShift) that supports, exposes, and safeguards that flexibility and power for devs AND ops. I'll do an overview of the features and patterns in OpenShift that make it easy to build and deploy applications, with a quick demo of how it puts Docker containers to work in a cluster for local and remote development.

Since OpenShift is built on top of Kubernetes, I'll also describe how Kubernetes was built to solve Google-scale problems and how even the humblest local web application can benefit from those patterns.


February 18th: Hack Night!

2016-02-17

The focus of this week's hack night we be to get a pilot (our current physical server) running as a VM on the new machine. Jmainguy has already copied over a disk image, so our tasks will be to verify that we are happy with the host configuration, to boot the pilot VM and verify that services (ssh, http, mail) are working properly, and to configure any proxying from the host to VM that is needed. If we are successful in this, we can draft a plan for swapping out the current pilot for the new VM server.

Come join us for some intellectual socializing and hacking for a great cause!


February 11th - Lightning Talks

2016-01-26

We all know the TriLUG community is an infinite pool of enabling wisdom. Now it is time to tap into the intellectual resources of the group. Our next meeting will be all about sharing your ideas via Lightning Talks. The ultimate goal is knowledge transfer and maximum participation is required to make it awesome.

You will have approximately 10 minutes to engage the audience on a topic of your choice. You can prep slides for presentation or you can lead a group discussion.

Respond to the mailing list with your topic and we will reserve your time, first come first serve.

Topic 1: A lightning tour of Haskell, a lazy, functional programming language with a rich type Presenter: Jack Hill

Topic 2: Sound Reinforcement 101, For Software People Presenter: Matthew Frazier

Linux is excellent for audio work, but this won't cover too much of the software side. This talk is more for those who are coming at sound reinforcement from the software side, and getting tripped up when audio signals behave differently than software people tend to expect. (Like me, when I first started getting involved with the production crew at church.)

Depending on how much I can pack into 10 minutes, we'll cover the nature of sound, how it gets carried in both analog and digital forms, what all the weird equipment you see sound engineers carrying around does, and how to finagle sound into the format you want when you're hooking cables together.

Topic 3: Demo a Minecraft Server running on a Raspberry Pi 2 Presenter: Emmett Miller (age 6) and Scott Miller

Here is a teaser slide: http://i.imgur.com/tgfi5Sd.png

Topic 4: Migrating WordPress snapshots within OpenShift Presenter: Donald Frustaglio

Topic 5: Advanced use of LibreOffice Presenter: Jeremy Davis

For two years I have used LibreOffice to publish the Triangle Career Development Newsletter. The relational database known as LibreOffice Base is the primary workhorse of the operation, which I use to gather information from over 100 websites. Once I capture all the data for upcoming events, a set of queries sorts and organizes the data then concatenates the results with HTML to create a nicely formatted newsletter ready to publish. One step of the process also involves LibreOffice Calc with a few hefty formulas to zip everything together. I will walk you through the process. The goal of this talk is to demonstrate the integrity and advanced capabilities of LibreOffice.


January 21: Hack Night!

2016-01-15

After months of hard work and phone tag by TriLUG sysadmins and volunteers, our new server, Moya, has been racked and installed in temporary housing! (Thanks to MetaMetrics for providing the space!) Our mission tonight is to convert our current server into a VM and get it running on the new server.

We will plan and coordinate our efforts in advance on the #trilug-sys IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net.


Meeting January 14: Investigating and Addressing Performance Issues

2015-12-23

Slides: Google Drive

Synopsis
Rather than just accepting poor system performance, you can use the tools available in Linux to better understand the underlying causes of those issues and suggest ways of resolving them. This presentation will include:

  • How to use tools such as the Linux kernel's perf tool to show what regions of code consume the most processor time.
  • How to identify areas of an application that most need to be optimized.
  • How modern processors work (just enough to better interpret performance data).
  • A demonstration of these tools running on a Dragonboard 410c, an inexpensive aarch64 development board.

Bio
William Cohen has been a developer of performance tools at Red Hat for the past decade. He has worked on numerous performance tools in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora, including OProfile, PAPI, SystemTap, and Dyninst.

Officer Nominations
This meeting will include an election to replace resigning PR Officer Matthew Frazier on the TriLUG Steering Committee. Currently, Jeremy Davis is nominated. If you wish to nominate yourself, you can do so on the TriLUG mailing list or at the meeting.

Sponsor
Apex Systems, an On Assignment company (NYSE: ASGN), provides organizations with scalable IT staffing solutions to address critical gaps in their current workforce and augment workforce management strategies. We specialize in providing IT professionals for contract, contract-to-hire, direct placement, and managed solutions to clients in Fortune 500, mid-market, and emerging companies.

Visit http://www.apexsystemsinc.com to learn more about Apex. To view our current job openings and join our Talent Network, visit http://itcareers.apexsystemsinc.com.


Annual Holiday Party: December 10, 2015

2015-11-24

Ring in the end of the year with TriLUG! Our annual Holiday Party is a great time of delicious food, cool demos, and socializing with other FOSS enthusiasts. This year, we're at the Red Hat Annex in downtown Raleigh.

Demos of all kinds are welcome. It can be as simple as a cool piece of software you found on the Net, or as complicated as a 3-D printed electronic Halloween costume. Just let us know in the signup form. And food is provided! The party is being catered by Neomonde, and if you want to bring something else in addition, feel free!

We need to let Red Hat know our guest list by 5 PM on Wednesday, December 9. Use this form to RSVP.


November 19: Hack Night!

2015-11-17

After months of hard work and phone tag by TriLUG sysadmins and volunteers, our new server, Moya, has been racked and installed in temporary housing! (Thanks to MetaMetrics for providing the space!) Our mission tonight is to stand up additional VM's and develop procedures and documentation for managing them.

We will plan and coordinate our efforts in advance on the #trilug-sys IRC channel, on irc.freenode.net.


[TriLUG]

The Linux Users Group of the Triangle. Serving Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and RTP.

Sponsors

Our monthly meetings are hosted by:



Dr. Warren Jasper



Hosting Sponsor

Hosting for TriLUG's infrastructure is provided by:

NetActuate


3D Printed "TriTuxes" provided by:
Brian Henning