March ’13 SLUG meet is held as usual at the Cock Hotel Wellington Thursday 28th @7:30 onwards. Food is available on the night. This month David Owen has kindly volunteered to bring his combat robot along and give us a talk on it’s inner workings. Second up is a group talk on the up coming Raspberry Jam, what can you do for the cause, bring your Raspberry 
!!!
Last week we had the opportunity to talk to Alex of Space Gambit in of all places Shrewsbury High street. The upshot is that we have been asked to come with a proposal for a Space Related Project. The project can be anything space related,the project will be judged on it’s merits and the budget required (Up to 20K$). As well as technical merit, an educational element is important also the project must also be open source!
Fellow Space Cadets get your thinking caps (or should that be Helmets) on and create some great ideas for a SLUG project.
We are looking at having a Raspberry Jam event here in sunny Telford. The event will obviously be focused on RPI but exclusively. We have access to excellent quality facilities it the way of TCAT . By it’s very nature it will be educational biased but we need people like you to come along, bring your PI and tell us what you are doing with it, learn what others are doing and give folk the general leg up. No project is too small, not finished don’t worry tell us about your progress after all often its the journey that we learn the most from not the final product.
Contact us via comments here or on the mailing list if you are on there.
I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s FOSDEM event in Brussels early this Feb’.
It’ s an annual event started in 2001 and although aimed at developers or others involved in Open Source projects it’s open to anyone who has an interest in open source software.
Held in the University of Brussels it’s simply huge with some 7000 attendees and 486 speakers for 487 sessions and 40 tracks it simply takes over the campus for the weekend,
many of these sessions were videoed I highly recommend visiting their Video Repository.
In a short paragraph it’s simply not possible to tell you every thing that was there every area of open source software was represented, there’s something for any and everyone. I was particularly interested in the Linux on ARM /ARM64 talks and robotics tracks and no doubt I’ll be talking about these at some latter date
There are also developer rooms where project members can get together and code as well as the normal stalls of Companies and open Source projects.
It should be noted that although they give you the opportunity to donate the entire event is free to attendees, flight and hotel for 3 days was less than £200 a bargain!!
Inspire yourself next year and go to FOSDEM 2014
John Alexander is going to talk about using the command line and getting to know the key areas that you can control or change using it.
We are going to try and have Raspberry Pi and such like technologies to play with or help sort out problems with them if your stuck.
Have a look at the Hotels website at http://www.cockhotel.co.uk/ and we’ll be in the back room – as for the ‘computer group’ at the bar. Essentially we get the room for free on the basis that a good amount of us buy a meal of Chips / pork pie – which are really nice and seems a decent deal.
David Phizacklea, Director, Jumbo IT Services talked about Backing up database systems from his experience of providing these commercial services for many years now.
David gave a good-humored account of some ‘situations’ (lets say) where companies have expected nothing short of magic to get their data back after careless storage. He talked about their companies setup and the use of Open Source applications for moving data around and developments to make it very efficient.
Thanks – another good evening.
Telford Hamfest – Muchly overdue comments.
The Hamfest went well, as usual (because we’ve done this for some years now) very good levels of interest and discussions and problem solving!
The main difference for us from other stall holders is that our measurement of success isn’t monetary income but levels of interest raised and return visitors from the past.
This year We had three sets of demonstrations:
These ‘Hamfests’ demonstraten a change in understanding of Linux over the years – I think in the early 2000s we often had the slightly mocking ‘does it work in Windows’ but as years pass the questions come in at all levels, from ‘having trouble with drivers for my usb interface module’ for some more obscure distro – through to the ‘I’ve heard of it but the cd I have wont run it, help!’ and some very obscure requests for help. I don;’t remember any that we couldn’t actually give some positive help or post directions to help.
The reality of these days is that we are much more likely to help other Linux User Groups increase members than our own, due to it being an event where most people travel distance to visit – although some notable exceptions on that (hello DaveM!).
A physically tiring day but left feeling positive that there are more people trying Linux and also using it. Thanks to all those helping on the day. Any photos anyone?
Linuxtoday.com
