Last night, we had our first meeting at our (hopefully) permanent new location: Williams Coffee Pub (Bryne Dr. off Mapleview). Due to the dwindling attendance numbers and general difficulty in finding time to do presentations, we've decided to roll the discussion + coffee portion of the night into our primary meeting location and get free WiFi as a bonus! The Wifi worked perfectly with my Ubuntu laptop until they shut it down in an attempt to encourage people to leave so they could close early (the weather was a bit extreme), but overall it was a great meeting. Hope to see you all next month!

SFD'07 has come and gone, and there's way too much to say about it in the small amount of area the news module of our website can contain. Check out the link to the forum posting below to get the full story: Full Story Here

Chris Browne has been kind enough to provide a PDF version of his January presentation to the BLUG. The file is 4.9 meg and available under the downloads section. If you couldn't make it that night, check it out. - Pat

SFD '06 has come and gone and despite a few really interested people, we didn't have the great turnout of last year's event. Thanks to Paul, Steve and Alex's nephew Alex for showing up and helping James, Alex and myself to run the event this year.

We started the morning with a bit of a shock. Despite our advertising stating the event started at 9am, the library itself wasn't open till 10 on Saturdays! I arrived first, so I was the only one who had to haul the equipment back home (which is only 2 blocks away, so no big deal :) After that shaky start, we spent a few minutes clearing out the chairs and setting up the tables around the room. The displays this year consisted of a few laptops and my (stupidly heavy) 19" monitor connected to the Blug demo box showing off Ubuntu software. The internet was up and running an hour or so, thanks to some dedicated folks at Point2Point internet (Thanks Dave!!).

The day could be summarized as long periods of no people followed by lots of people at once followed by more periods of peoplelessness (yes I made that word up). A few people expressed interest in attending our next meeting to learn more about open source software, so I hope to see some new faces in October.

Overall, I think we made a few mistakes in organizing and advertising the event, which we vowed to rectify for next year's SFD. Thanks again to everyone who helped with the planning, and implementation of our second annual Software Freedom Day.

- Pat

UPDATE: Added pictures to the gallery HERE

Press Release: Barrie, Ontario, Canada - September 14, 2006

Barrie's second Software Freedom Day - September 16, 2006

Thousands of people expected to gather in cities around Canada and the world to share and promote the benefits of free and open source software.

The Barrie Linux Users Group is proud to announce Barrie's inaugural Software Freedom Day on September 16, 2006. Software Freedom Day is a global initiative to celebrate and give back to the community by taking Free and Open Source software to the streets! The event will be held from 9am to 4pm at the Barrie Public Library’s Georgian Room.

Software Freedom Day will have over hundreds of teams across the world doing a variety of activities, including distributing free Linux CDs and other giveaways, running booths about Linux and open source software

More information about free software can be found online at http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/FLOSS_Concept_Booklet

Free software offers everyone all the tools they need to improve their computer literacy, without any upfront cost. Computers have become an integral part of society and now drive most businesses. Computer skills have therefore become essential to advancing a person's career.

In addition to job prospects, computer skills and online communications equip an individual with the means to a better education, online services and goods, a broader community, and to opportunities that simply may not be accessible to them in their area. The online culture does not judge people on their colour, age, sex, or beliefs, but rather on their achievements, and with the right tools, what an individual can achieve with a computer is solely limited by their imagination.

Examples of free software include the Linux operating system, OpenOffice.org office productivity suite, Firefox Web browser, and the GIMP image manipulation tool (similar to Adobe Photoshop). There is also free software for gaming, instant messaging, business and financial applications, and many more areas of computing.

Discover Free Software and what it can do for you on Software Freedom Day, September 16!

About Software Freedom Day

Software Freedom Day is a global initiative to celebrate and give back to the community by taking Free and Open Source software to the streets! See http://www.softwarefreedomday.org for more information.

About the Barrie Linux Users Group

The Barrie Linux Users Group (BLUG) was founded to cater for the needs of the Barrie Linux community and to promote the use of Linux and open source software in Barrie and central Ontario. For more information and the monthly meeting schedule see http://www.barrielug.org/ .


Contacts:

Alexander Rau – BLUG founder & event coordinator – alex.arau[it_goes_here]gmail.com

Pat Wendorf – BLUG founder & event coordinator – dungeons[it_goes_here]gmail.com

James Linden – BLUG co-founder & event coordinator – jl[it_goes_here]jameslinden.com


Journalists are very welcome to these events, and please contact us if you are interested in more information, interviews or photos.

Warmest regards,

Alexander Rau, Pat Wendorf, James Linden

We now have a calendar of events module for the website. You can view it from the 'Calendar of Events' link in the navigation block on the left sidebar.

Feel free to submit any events which don't already exist.

-- James

Thanks to James, we were able to recover all our PostNuke user database and forums (minus the poster).  If you haven't signed up with the new site yet, your original user/pass should work fine.  If you've forgotten it, the system will mail a new password to you.  This takes care of the highest ranked item in our poll.  Next we'll look into an event calendar system and the wiki.

- Pat

This has to be one of the coolest things I've heard in a long while. The CBC has released some basic specs on the software that runs cbc.ca. To spoil the article: It's all OSS. Apache, Tomcat, Postgres, FreeBSD, Mailman, Postfix, Cacti and Nagios are all mentioned by name (and in the right context even!) in the article. Check it out, and try not to sing Oh Canada! with a tear in your eye ;)

http://www.insidethecbc.com/2006/07/15/under-the-hood-at-cbcca-open-source

I'm proud to announce, our new website is alive! After a few long months of a static website, we finally have the manpower and the skills to go back to a dynamic content management system. After a week or so of the page being hosted at test.barrielug.org we've released it on the public URL. The system in use is PHP-Fusion, which seems to have all the nice features of our old CMS (PostNuke), but with a significantly better security record.

We haven't migrated the content from the old system, which includes the user accounts, so you'll have to sign up on the website again. Despite that, our forums are open for questions, our pages are open for news submission and the BLUG website is back in business :)

- Pat

I think I found the pic we use for the BLUG logo:

After I don't know how many months (or possibly even years) we (or should I say Pat) were able to finally get away with our static web site.

As many of you remember we had to shut down the old site due to security issues in the post-nuke code. Since all of us are very busy in their money making careers the re-incarnation of a new CMS based site took its time.

We finally agreed on the PHP-Fusion engine (which came highly recommended by James).

We slowly but surely are adding content to the site and hope to re-create the richness of the much missed old site.

We are putting the call out to you to find a couple of people who are willing to help us actively administer the site. I am afraid that due to other commitments (unfortunately life is not open source and bills need to be paid!) we could potentially fall back to the dark static page ages.

So please help us keep this web site going and enjoy the rich content and the great contributions of our members.

Thanks

AR