[luv-announce] LUV October Meeting - Linux at the Observatory and OpenWRT

------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tuesday 4 October 6:30pm for 7pm start at The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building, Trinity College, Melbourne University Main Campus, Parkville. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Talks: * Use of Linux at the Australian Astronomical Observatory — Tim Connors * OpenWRT: A GNU/Linux based firmware program for embedded devices such as residential gateways and routers — Bernie Schelberg * 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 — 15 October 2011 * #luv IRC channel * mailing list policy * Map of the meeting location http://luv.asn.au/content/venue-maps http://luv.asn.au/2011/10/04 ** Use of Linux at the Australian Astronomical Observatory — Tim Connors ** Tim Connors worked at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (nee Anglo- Australian Observatory) in Coonabarabran as a telescope operator while finishing his PhD in astrophysics at the Swinburne centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing. He never could quite let go of wanting the systems to work just right, so was given the keys to the observatory computers, ands lowly brought the systems kicking and screaming, into the modern age. Machines running Linux came to represent a far more sensible way of managing a heterogeneous network of custom controllers and hardware. And he's not joking about the modernising: halfway through his tenure, he took part in a project to replace what was almost certainly Australia's oldest continually operating production computer — the telescope control computer that had been faithfully reading and controlling the telescope's position 10 times a second for the past 35 years (and acting as a 10kW room heater), with an industrial Linux machine that only took up half a rack. This talk is a summary of that journey through time (but not space). Tim has since left the dizzying heights of the observatory, and helps ensure the Bureau of Meteorology keep the data flowing. When he's not busy failing over www.bom, he likes to hoon around on bikes that don't crash because of proprietary kernel drivers. ** OpenWRT: A GNU/Linux based firmware program for embedded devices such as residential gateways and routers — Bernie Schelberg ** OpenWRT is a GNU/Linux distribution for your wireless router, particularly common residential networking devices. It is a highly configurable system that enables you to do many things that normally require expensive equipment to do effectively. Bernie Schelberg has a Bachelor's Degree in Information Technology, and works as a computer programmer by day (and night!). He is passionate about free (libre) software, and enjoys tinkering with various distributions, virtualization, and embedded devices such as phones. ** Note — BTRFS talk cancelled ** Unfortunately, the previously announced talk on BTRFS had to be cancelled / postponed. ** 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 — 15th October ** The August Beginner's Workshop will be held on the third Saturday at The Hub, with the usual unstructured workshop area and a talk by Donna Benjamin giving an introduction to Inkscape. 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