KWLUG - The Kitchener Waterloo Linux User Group

Raul Suarez will give a practical introduction to programming in Linux.

He writes: A very common question I've heard in on-line forums and casual chat is: "I'd like to develop for Linux, where do I start?"

This presentation is meant to provide an answer to that question. Probably not the ultimate answer and certainly not a comprehensive one as it won't cover every single possibility, but it should at least point the novice Linux developer on the right track.

Chris Frey will give us an overview of the git revision control system. He will take the fear out of git by explaining:

• the low level mechanics
• git's philosophy and workflow
• how to get started with a _few_ basic commands
• how git uses the network
• show some cool things that can be done, to stimulate further pursuit
• where to get more information
• if there's time, how to use git with other SCMs

KWLUG members will give a number of quick (30 minute or less) demonstrations of assorted Linux goodies.

- Richard Weait will answer the question: "What Linux Distro Should I Use?"

- Rob Day will give a whirlwind tour of the steps involved in compiling kernels.

Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com will give a presentation on the the MySQL database.

MySQL is a popular and free database management system used in many applications, and by many web sites.

• Relational databases and SQL
• What is MySQL?
• History of MySQL?
• Who is using MySQL?
• Advantages and disadvantages
• The plethora of MySQL engines
• The MyISAM and InnoDB engines
• Creating a database
• Creating tables
• Inserting, retrieving and deleting data
• Backup, replication and repair
• The future of MySQL

The slides from the presentation are now here.

Virtualization systems allows your computer to run more than one operating system at the same time. KVM is a Hypervisor -- the main part of a virtualization system -- included in the Linux Kernel. Chris Irwin will show us what virtualization is, as well as how and why to use KVM, QEMU, and libvirt on Linux.

This presentation is suitable for those new to virtualization and curious about it as well as those with moderate virtualization experience.

Update: Here are a tarball of the presentation slides.

Presentation topics covered ...

You search text every day, often many times. Although much of that may be Internet searches, there are still lots of places to use the pattern matching power of Regular Expressions.

The cryptic looking regular expressions are usually quite simple. This presentation will help you understand the most commonly used features of regular expressions and will cover the most commonly used tools and a couple of programming languages.

So whether you are a graphical interface user, command line user, system administrator or programmer you'll find regular expressions useful.

Eric Gerlach will demonstrate the use of preseeding, PXE booting, local mirrors and other tricks he uses to automate Linux server installations. You will be amazed and delighted by Eric's daring demonstrations of eliminating the mundane aspects of installing a new system while still getting the system you want, the system you need, even the system you deserve. This presentation is suitable for all audiences. If you have ever installed a Linux system, or thought about it, you'll learn something fun.

Kyle Spaans will show us the care, feeding and deciphering of the LaTeX typesetting language.

In this presentation I will show how you can remotely access other computers to work as if you were in front of the keyboard or let other people view your desktop or control your computer, even behind firewalls. All using Free software.

The presentation will be at the end user level, showing the practical and hands-on side of it. The presentation is not about explaining the technology, just how to use it.

In this presentation, Khalid will go through various tools and techniques used to analyze performance issues with systems running Linux.

We will cover a bit of everything:
- Status tools
- Debugging/profiling, with an emphasis on performance rather than code debugging.
- Monitoring tools
- Statistics tools

We will examine live systems running the above tools where possible, in order to show real life data ...