April 2018
Traditionally, Linux distributions have relied on package archives maintained by groups of trusted maintainers. While this works well, users often end up looking to third party sources for newer versions or software missing from the main archive. This can reduce the security of a system, since traditional packaging systems place a lot of trust in the package maintainers (e.g. running scripts as root during package installation).
This talk will look at the snapd packaging system, which is inspired by the confinement strategies used for smart phone applications. In particular, it will look at how it is used on the Ubuntu Desktop.
May 2018
Come and join us as PLUG celebrates the release of Ubuntu 18.04, the latest long-term support release of the very popular Ubuntu Linux. We will have a limited number of USB drives and DVDs with this latest release of Ubuntu to give out at the event, which you can use to try or even install Ubuntu. We’ll also be showing off 18.04 on some laptops if you just want to have a play.
June 2018
Chromebooks Unleashed is a talk on the surprising potential of a cheap Chromebook as a developer machine, as a toy and as a sandbox for experimentation. Learn about Crouton, the Chromium OS Universal Chroot Environment, and GalliumOS, a Linux distribution built specifically for Chromebooks. The talk is complete with two live demos, one of which might work. Join the excitement and enjoy the suspense!
July 2018
Modern user-space GNU tools and scripting languages on Android with Termux, and also the TinyCore Linux variant piCore running on a Raspberry Pi.
August 2018
What is the ‘Matrix’? What features does it have? What is ‘PerthChat’ and why was it created? Could it be the perfect hangout for PLUG members? All these questions and more will be answered!
September 2018
“Get more sleep” by Benjamin is a short talk on “how to get better sleep, faster”. It’s about a journey toward making late nights less painful, and the tools that journey revealed. You’ll learn about f.lux and various other programs that will help you conquer the enemy - blue light.
October 2018
Once upon a time, Debian was a GNU/Linux distribution that was mainly for hobbyists. It always existed in the shadow of commercial distributions such as Red Hat, and their derivatives. Then Canonical used it to create Ubuntu, and the world changed. (In the interim though, there were a lot of businesses relying on Debian as a stable, low-TCO server OS with good security support.)
If you are running Debian on a personal host or in production, you might have wondered how Debian packages work and whether you have a use case for which they could make your life simpler. This talk will attempt to shed light on these questions.