Recording: YouTube

Synopsis Duke University provides access to a wide variety of Linux applications, for student projects, teaching, and research. Besides provisioning hundreds of traditional Linux VM's each semester, Duke is taking advantage of emerging container technologies to host applications.

This presentation will explore a few of the technologies and tools Duke has used for application delivery, including the 350 Ubuntu containers running on Docker that host R and RStudio for statistics courses, and the noVNC/OpenBox solution used to embed X Windows applications in users' Web browsers. (Source code for some of this technology will be available on GitHub.) It will also discuss more generally the strategy and the tradeoffs involved in providing virtualized applications - especially when you have to give sudo access to students.

Bio Mark McCahill works at Duke University's Office of Information Technology, as an architect for e-learning and collaborative systems. He was involved in the development and popularization of early Internet technologies - most notably at the University of Minnesota, where he led the team that developed Gopher. He is also interested in virtual worlds, developing the GopherVR system for organizing Gopher information spatially, and serving as an architect of the Croquet project.

TriLUG welcomes speakers on any topic related to free and open source software! If you have been invited to speak at TriLUG, or you would like to propose a talk yourself, read this page for information about what to expect.

If you are interested in speaking, please email steering@trilug.org with the topic you would like to speak on, the dates on which you are available, and a brief biography. You can also contact us if you have any questions about speaking which are not answered on this page.

Format: TriLUG talks are delivered in a lecture hall or similar space, to an audience of anywhere between 40 and 100+. The "talk" section of each meeting lasts 70-90 minutes, including questions (however you wish to handle them).

Subject Matter: Anything related to Free and Open Source Software is fair game. This includes presentations about and demonstrations of particular software, but it also includes talks about the community aspects of FOSS, such as career development, community management, technical writing, presentation skills, and applications of FOSS in society.

We prefer talks that appeal to a broad range of FOSS users, including software developers, system administrators, community leaders, and hobbyists, using a variety of technology stacks, and at varying experience levels. As a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, we cannot engage in political campaigning, and prefer to avoid explicitly political topics.

Anti-Harassment: As stated in our anti-harassment policy, TriLUG is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, religion, country of origin, or age. We expect speakers to abide by this policy, and therefore to refrain from offensive verbal comments, deliberate intimidation, and sexualized images, activities, or other material.

(If you feel that you are particularly likely to be targeted for harassment, we can make special arrangements to ensure your safety.)

Date and Time: TriLUG meetings are held the second Thursday of each month from 6:45-9pm. We are always looking for speakers.

Location: We are currently hosted at the NCSU College of Textiles, meeting in room 1120. The room is marked with a circled star near the top left of the map (the parking entrance is marked with a circled "P" around the bottom center).

Audio, Video, Power: We will ensure that a projection screen with an HDMI, Mini-DisplayPort, and VGA laptop connector is available for presenters to use at each meeting, as well as at least one power outlet. If you need additional audio, video, or power capabilities, let us know in advance so that we can contact our hosts. If you plan to use a laptop to project slides or other material, we would appreciate if you allowed us to use it to project the meeting introduction slides.

Recording: Generally, TriLUG meetings are recorded and posted on YouTube. We can make exceptions if you would prefer not to be recorded.

Food and Beverage: Pizza and soft drinks are provided for attendees at each meeting. We do not currently make accommodations for vegans or gluten-free persons, but we may be able to do so upon request. Alcohol is not permitted at meetings.

Post-Meeting: After each meeting, we hold "TriCHUG" at a local restaurant (Ba-Da Wings in the Mission Valley Shopping Center) for food and/or beer. Usually about 10-12 members attend, but it is completely optional for speakers. (And despite the name, nobody gets hammered.)

Expenses: We currently do not have the funds to cover speakers' travel expenses or other expenses. (Someone may pay for your meal at the post-meeting, though.)

Recording: YouTube

Synopsis Free and open source software owes its existence to copyright laws, but as the community has grown, understanding of copyright and licensing has diminished. Source code hosting sites are now replete with improperly licensed projects, license violations, and users and developers who are unclear what rights they actually have. But it doesn't have to be this way!

This presentation will open with a crash course on copyright, and then narrow its focus to issues related to Free Software licensing -- how the licenses actually work, how to choose a license appropriate for your project, where trademarks and patents fit into all this, and what licensing things you should NEVER EVER DO. We'll close with a look at the Supreme Court's recent decision in Oracle v. Google and its implications for free software.

Bio Matthew Frazier is TriLUG's PR Officer and a recent graduate of NC State University's Computer Science program. At NC State, he developed and taught the Digital Millennium Copyright Class, a one-hour seminar course on modern copyright issues. He enjoys participating in the free/open source software community by presenting and teaching at conferences and user groups. (And sometimes he even writes code.)

Topic: Workshop on Open-source Phones and TriLUG Infrastructure When: Thursday, 18th June 2015, 7pm - 9pm Where: Splat Space; 800 N Mangum St, Durham, NC 27701; and #trilug-sys on freenode Parking: See http://splatspace.org/location/ Map: Google Maps

(Also showing on the Splat Space Meetup page.)

Work on a personal project, hone your skills, or try something you learned about at a recent meeting. While you're at it, help us maintain the TriLUG infrastructure.

Maybe you can bring an old phone down and see if CyanogenMod or another free OS can be flashed onto it, or play around with other free software available on your phone.

This month we continue tweaking our offsite backups, take the first steps down the path to the next incarnation of our infrastructure, and set up a group infrastructure git repository. Come on down and dig in!

Synopsis Freedom and convenience are often at odds, especially in the modern world of cloud computing and mobile devices. This talk will present the speaker's journey from using a largely closed source, closed protocol mobile platform to a much more free and open mobile operating system. Due to the relationship between mobile and cloud computing, a significant portion of the journey involved choosing free software for the server side as well. Many challenges were faced along the way! This talk will discuss the various free client and server software components that were necessary to protect the speaker's privacy and freedom, while maintaining a comparable level of service to that which was enjoyed before. A few alternatives to these choices will also be discussed, and during the Q+A session suggestions for competing software will be welcomed.

Bio Randy Barlow is a software engineer at Red Hat, Inc. He currently works on the Pulp Project, a component of Red Hat Satellite 6 that performs software repository management. He has been working with Python since 2006 and has also worked with C++, Java, and PHP prior to that. His experience includes scientific computing, natural language processing, systems management, and web development. He is a Linux geek and loves free software.

Video: https://youtu.be/es6xBRhtaN8 Slides: http://trilug.org/~rpbarlow/open_source_your_phone.odp

Topic: How to Give a Tech Talk Presenters: Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, Chris Collins When: Thursday, 14th May, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 2 Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: Youtube

Synopsis: Giving a tech talk can seem daunting. Come get some tips and tricks from folks who have done it before.

This presentation will be a panel discussion about how to give a technical presentation. Panelists Brian Gerard, Daniel Farrell, Jason Hibbets, Sandi Metz, and Chris Collins will join us to talk about how they prepare to give a presentation, what to do and avoid during a presentation, how they handle questions from the crowd, and other aspects of presenting.

Bios:

Brian Gerard has been working with various *nixes, and Linux specifically, since the mid-'90s, as a Systems Administrator, a Software Engineer, and an end user. After eight years developing abuse defenses for Yahoo! and training their engineers, he now uses his expertise doing deployment automation and security work for WebAssign.

Daniel Farrell is a Software Engineer on Red Hat’s SDN Team, where he contributes to upstream OpenDaylight and OPNFV. He has been involved in SDN’s development since it emerged from Stanford, including early OpenFlow and OpenStack work. He’s now an active committer on OpenDaylight’s Integration Team.

Jason Hibbets is a senior community evangelist in Corporate Marketing at Red Hat where he is a community manager for Opensource.com. He has been with Red Hat since 2003 and is the author of The foundation for an open source city. Prior roles include senior marketing specialist, project manager, Red Hat Knowledgebase maintainer, and support engineer.

Sandi Metz, author of "Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby", believes in simple code and straightforward explanations. She prefers working software, practical solutions and lengthy bicycle trips (not necessarily in that order) and consults and teaches and speaks on all things OOP.

Chris Collins began working for Duke in 2006, and became a systems administrator with the Duke Office of Information Technology's Linux team in 2008. As a technical lead and tech enthusiast, he teaches introductory and intermediate courses and workshops to a wide variety of audiences around campus, and regularly gives presentations highlighting new projects and technologies.

Topic: Living the Devops! Presenter: Barry Peddycord III When: Thursday, 9th April 2015, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building 3 Room 2201, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps

Synopsis: This presentation will introduce and describe the workflow and tools used by the Customer Engineering team at Cumulus Networks to manage and improve their internal infrastructure. The team is distributed from San Francisco to Cary to Wales, and uses a combination of issue tracking (Jira), version control (Github), and configuration management tools (Puppet) to manage a fleet of Virtual Machines that provide continuous integration, package management, and other services for the team to use. This presented assumes no prior knowledge of the tools that will be discussed, and should be approachable to a general audience with a technical background.

Bio: Barry Peddycord III is the current chair of the Trilug Steering Committee and has been an active member of Trilug since 2011. Barry holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Computer Science from NC State, and has recently started working at Cumulus Networks, a company that develops a version of Linux designed to run on network switches.

Topic: Workshop on DevOps and TriLUG Infrastructure When: Thursday, 16th April 2015, 7pm - 9pm Where: WebAssign 1791 Varsity Drive #200 Raleigh, NC 27606 (NCSU Centennial Campus); and #trilug-sys on freenode Parking: The parking deck at the rear Map: Google Maps

Work on a personal project, hone your skills, or try something you learned about at a recent meeting. While you're at it, help us maintain the TriLUG infrastructure.

This month we continue tweaking our offsite backups, take the first steps down the path to the next incarnation of our infrastructure, and set up a group infrastructure git repository. Come on down and dig in!