------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tuesday 6 December 6:30pm for 7pm start at The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building, Trinity College, Melbourne University Main Campus, Parkville. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talks — Freedom double feature: * Going Fully Free — Ben Sturmfels * Anti-competitive Aspects of UEFI Secure Boot — Lev Lafayette * Library of LUV * After the meeting, come have dinner with us at Maria's Trattoria! 122-124 Peel St Also in this announcement: * Beginner's Workshop — 17 December 2011 * #luv IRC channel * mailing list policy * Map of the meeting location http://luv.asn.au/content/venue-maps http://luv.asn.au/2011/12/06 ** Going Fully Free — Ben Sturmfels ** Members of LUV should be immensely proud of their efforts to get free software into the hands of the general public. Unfortunately though, without an understanding of why their freedom matters, we watch many people drift slowly back to proprietary software. Fully-free distributions have an important role to play in spreading not only free software, but the values of our community. We'll discuss popular fully- free distributions, common arguments and sticking points, and how this can super-charge our advocacy. Ben is a free software developer from Brunswick. He's also a LUV committee member. If you're lucky he might not talk about software patents again. ** Anti-competitive Aspects of UEFI Secure Boot — Lev Lafayette ** The Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) a defines a secure replacement for BIOS firmware by allowing verification of digital signatures before booting. Whilst this does protect against malware such as rootkits, legitimate concerns have been raised that certain non-free operating systems will use this hardware feature to prevent users from booting other operating systems (e.g., Linux). This presentation addresses the technical background to UEFI, the concerns raised on monopolistic practise, and the potential solutions. Lev is a systems administrator and quality management coordinator at the Victorian Partnership for Advanced Computing, a graduate from Murdoch University and has recently completed an MBA in Technology Management from Chifley. He is the current President of Linux Users of Victoria. ** Library of LUV ** Library of LUV is a collection of books available for loan to members. The collection is managed through the wiki and the books are circulated at the monthly LUV meetings (and the Penguin Picnic, in January). For more details, please see the wiki: http://wiki.luv.asn.au/LoL ** Dinner ** Before and/or after each meeting those who are interested are welcome to join other members for dinner. We are open to suggestions for a good place to eat near our venue. Maria's on Peel Street in North Melbourne is currently the most popular place to eat after meetings. ** Beginner's Workshop — 17th December ** The December Beginner's Workshop will be held on the third Saturday at The Hub, with the usual unstructured workshop area and a talk by Alec Clews giving some tips, tricks and tools for programming novices. Bring your laptop! For more info, updates and discussion about the Beginner's Workshop, subscribe to the luv-beginners mailing list: http://lists.luv.asn.au/luv-beginners The Melbourne OLPC Club meetings are co-located with the Beginner's Workshops. If you are interested in the OLPC project, please come and join in! Drupal Melbourne meetings are also co-located with the Beginner's Workshops, taking place in the Long Room at The Hub. ** #luv IRC channel ** A reminder that LUV has an IRC channel - join #luv on FreeNode to chat with fellow LUVvers in real time! ** Mailing list policy ** The committee does not generally monitor or moderate the LUV mailing lists and expects members to conduct themselves appropriately. On complaint, however, we may investigate, and if behaviour is unbecoming a member of LUV, we may remove that member from the mailing list for a period of time as deemed appropriate by the committee. ** Map of the meeting venue ** Our website now has an all-new map of the meeting venue, more clearly showing how to find the Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Just follow either of the red lines! http://luv.asn.au/content/venue-maps ** RedHat training discount ** A discount on RedHat training is available to LUV members. To obtain this discount, you need to enter: "Linux User Group member - 10% discount" in the special offer section of the enrolment form. http://www.redhat.com.au/training/ ** Acknowledgements ** LUV would like to acknowledge Red Hat for their help in obtaining the Buzzard Lecture Theatre venue, BENK Open Systems for sponsoring the Beginner's Workshops and VPAC for hosting! http://redhat.com.au http://benk.net.au http://vpac.org