KnoxBUG had the pleasure of having PacBSD's Adam Jimerson back. This time he took a deep dive on how PacBSD managed to integrate Arch Linux's package manager on top of an operating system built on top of FreeBSD's kernel and ports.
This past August, I had the pleasure of giving my first talk. The topic was Dzen. A great little utility you can find in just about any Unix like operating system that supports X11. This post will illustrate the most basic examples of how Dzen works. For more information please refer to my slides and the scripts that I posted.
Up until now, KnoxBUG has usually skipped June since many of our members would be either at BSDCan or SELF making it hard on people's schedules to come out to one more thing. This year we're going to change that and for good reason. As it turns out, June 19th 1993 was the day the official name for FreeBSD was agreed upon. It is for this reason that the FreeBSD Foundation has officially made June 19th National FreeBSD day. One of the ways the FreeBSD foundation has proposed that users celebrate, is by having an install fest at local meetup groups.
We had the pleasure of having Caleb Cooper back with another interesting presentation. This time the focus was on BASH scripting. I think it might have been due to how different shell scripts looked compared to the web languages I'm usually working with, but I've never really even considered doing more complex things with shell scripting up until now. Thanks to Caleb's presentation I think that might change. Here are some of the features I found to be interesting.
As great as our meetings have been so far, I have noticed something that I thought should be addressed. Our attendees and presenters have almost exclusively been from the FreeBSD community. While we love our OS of choice, we miss our other BSD cousins. It was a great breath of fresh air when we had our PacBSD talk and now we want more.
So this is KnoxBUG's official invitation to the greater BSD community in Tennessee to come join our BUG. Whether you are a user or a developer, want to present or simply attend, we'd love to have you join us. So PacBSD, DragonflyBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, UbuntuBSD, and any other BSD community members, heck even MacOS users, come on down!
In November, KnoxBUG had the good fortune of having the great Warren Block give a presentation about documentation. Most of us, including myself, don't usually think of documentation as an exciting part of the technology world. That's because it isn't really. Documentation is one of those things that we expect to be there, and to be correct. We don't really notice or make a judgment on the quality of documentation until we run into bad documentation and that is what this talk was about.
Well we had another great presentation last meeting. If you missed it, Adam Jimerson gave us an enlightening presentation about PacBSD. PacBSD (formerly known as ArchBSD) is an operating system that is basically an Arch like approach to FreeBSD. It has a small but effective community of contributors and is a really interesting hybrid between Arch and FreeBSD. The most notable features and differences are listed below.
So we had a change of plans during August's meeting. The good news was that we had a record turnout with quite a few new faces. The bad news was that our speaker Mark Sumter had car troubles and wasn't able to make it out. After sweating bullets for a couple of minutes, Ken Moore and Joe Maloney arrived and agreed to do their TrueOS talk which was originally scheduled for September's meeting. Despite the disadvantage of short notice and not having their slides with them, it was a fantastic presentation that lasted about 90 minutes. I took some notes for the benefit of anybody that was going to attend next month but wasn't present at our August meeting. I also wanted to let everybody know that Mark made it home safe and sound. He said he'll be able to do his ZFS talk at September's meeting. So here are some of the highlights of the new TrueOS.
Well, we had another meeting and it did not disappoint. I'd like to once again thank Caleb Cooper for giving his presentation on cryptography and identity assurance. Caleb was nice enough to make his slides available, so they have been posted to the listing here. It was great! Our next meeting has also been posted and the topic will be ZFS! For details please visit the listing here.
Additionally I'd like to introduce Mark Sumter, who will be giving a talk at our next meeting. In addition to being our speaker for August, he has been helping me out with organizing KnoxBUG this past month. He has been a tremendous help so I've asked him to be "officially" involved in organizing KnoxBUG. I'm looking forward to working with Mark to make KnoxBUG a success.