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KnoxBUG Roadmap for 2018

cover photo for article KnoxBUG roadmap 2018

KnoxBUG kicked things off in 2018 with our “Happy True Year” TrueOS install fest event. It was a nice informal gathering with drinks,pizza and a great turnout. There was much tinkering and laughing. As most of us do at the beginning of a new year, we also took time to reflect on the past year and make plans for how to make this new year even better.

One of the things we discussed was a change in format. While most of our attendees have been people with a lot of BSD / Unix / FOSS experience, we’ve also had a few people that are completely new to the open source world. Our talks have all been great but have mainly catered towards expert FOSS users. We want to change that approach.

October's talk available on YouTube!

Normally I take notes and provide a summary of our meeting. This time around, we made a video recording and published it to our KnoxBUG YouTube channel! Enjoy!

Recap of September's Talk

Porting a Linux Package Manager & Build Tools to PacBSD

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.

August 2017 Dzen Presentation Summary

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.

July meeting cancelled, see you in August!

I'm sorry to say things have gotten really busy this month and time has slipped away. I couldn't find anybody to book for July's meeting and the talk I was preparing is not ready, so I've decided to cancel this month's meeting. On a positive note, August's meeting has already been listed and I'll be presenting. More details here

Join us for National FreeBSD Day.

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.

Advanced BASH summary.

Advanced BASH by Caleb Cooper - unleash the power of your shell

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.

KnoxBUG Wants You!

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!

Block's Docs Talk.

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.

What we learned about PacBSD

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.