Details About Upcoming Meetings

Home Automation

Quoting, "Not your usual talk with a bit of it will be alright on the night throw in to watch how an ESP32 blends with some other Shenzhen silicon and GitHub spice to cook us some fluffy sound."

Introduction to the Enterprise Kubernetes Container Platform OpenShift

Building on his introductory talk, given on March 13^th, Peter discuss why container platforms make a huge difference when managing infrastructures of container-based workloads. Starting with Kubernetes which as a Google project (Borg) in the early 2000s, it has matured. (It's how Google runs everything they do.)

Microsoft, Red Hat, IBM and Docker were early backers and contributors to the project and by 2015 Kube 1.0 was adopted by CNCF. Today, Kubernetes is the de facto standard for container platforms with Kubernetes services on all major cloud providers, as well as smaller ones.

Before Kubernetes, Red Hat's OpenShift used containers but the introduction of Docker and Kubernetes changed how OpenShift would adopt and create the container platform. As an early adopter, Red Hat helped strengthen and expand the features of Kubernetes by first adding extra features in OpenShift. Over time, many of these features were adopted directly by the Kubernetes community. OpenShift is Kubernetes, with a lot of additional features not found in Kubernetes. It's the foundation for Hybrid Cloud deployments of containers, comes with a bunch of technologies from Red Hat and other vendors that easily to consume, create software pipelines, life cycle management and advanced network/storage features.

Session Objectives

• Background Preparation: To fully benefit from this presentation, previous knowledge of containers is necessary. To this end, attendees should view slides, a recording of the Introductory talk presented by Peter, etc. — see resources on the NoVaLUG Presentations page, under the entry for 2021.03.13.
• Introduction, with many links to useful resources for learning more details and playing with containers.
• Enable attendees to,
  • Deploy a container to OpenShift (Kubernetes),
  • Provision persistent storage for a container and make it scale,
  • Become familiar with key commands with oc/kubectl to inspect and manipulate a cluster and what is running.

About Peter Larsen

From his own words a few years ago: While I’ve been in the IT industry for a life time, I always feel like I’m learning and have to catch up. I started programming at the ripe age of 10 or so, using a Univac 1100. In the time where home computers weren’t known (70ies) I had access to remote terminals and learned how to operate it with a 150 baud modem. It gave me access to lots of games developed by university students which at that age made me interested in learning to program.

I have worked professionally in IT from around the age of 17, doing everything from system level programming to E-Business suites, Web Development, system integration, database optimization and lots more.

Today, working for Red Hat as a Solutions Architect I get to work a wide range of experiences helping our customers find the right solution to solve their problems.

Over the last 5 years (in 2016), I’ve followed OpenShift from version 1 to now version 3, and I’m responsible for making OpenShift implementations with customers that show-case the advanced features of the platform – beyond the sales talk, pretty slides and jargon.

The Rocky Linux Project

Note: This meeting, sponsored by the Wolverhampton (UK) LUG, will open at 14:40 EDT (19:30 GMT); the formal presentation will start ~  15:30&EDT (20:30 GMT).

Session Objectives

With the EOL of CentOS 8 coming this year and transition to a rolling release model, Greg Kurtzer is initiating the Rocky Linux Project, a free, community-run drop-in replacement for CentOS and RHEL. Greg is original founder of the CentOS.

After a whirlwind start of 3 months of infrastructure building, the first release candidate of Rocky Linux is expected by 31 March 2021; the official release is expected in mid-2021.

Greg and Leigh will speak and answer questions on:

• The formation and status of Rocky Linux,
• Address questions that sysadmins might have about migrating a CentOS system to Rocky Linux, and,
• How users can contribute to the success of the Project.

Reverse Engineering Example
Migrate & Re-engineer Closed Source Solutions

Derived from closed source Minitouner, Longmynd is an open source a pplication that "talks" via USB to a DVB-S/S2 demodulator. It is mainly used by the Amateur Television Community to receive Transmissions of video pictures.

The Longmynd re-write is a transmitter solution to run alongsice of Portsdown,a Raspberry Pi based Transmitter solution for DVB-S/S2 pictures. This allows for both TX and RX of video pictures on one, Raspberry Pi box. Hence, the Longmynd Receiver was born. The biggest challenge was that the specification and documentation of the DVB-S/S2 hardware (the Serrit NIM) was only available on an NDA basis and the USB interface between the hardware and the Windows PC (an FTDI board) contained custom code.

The presentation will tell the tale of some reverse engineering, trial and error, lucky guesses and hours of analysis of many GBytes of data which finally led to the fully functional, Longmynd Receiver on the RPI. The implementation has been used as the software basis for three new receivers, is fully Open Source (available on GitHUB), has been widely adopted in the ATV community. Longmynd is a two, significant, awards for innovation in the Amateur radio world.

CentOS Is Not Dead

— The rumors of CentOS' death are wildly exaggerated —

On December 8, 2020, Red Hat announced a big change for the CentOS project. Peter Larsen from Red Hat will talk about the changes and how it brings CentOS ("Stream") than CentOS Linux is today. He will discuss how Fedora, CentOS and RHEL get software, updates and how the process works. The process of converting CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream will also be described.

The GIMP

Background

The GIMP — GNU Image Manipulation Program — is a free and open source program licensed under the GPLv3+ license. It is very powerful alternative to non-free (expensive) image editing programs. It is available for Linux, Windows and macOS. The GIMP has been under continuous maintenance and development since 1995 and is widely used by amateurs and professional photographers for post processing of their images.

Session Objectives

This talk is aimed both at introducing prospective users to The GIMP as well as moving on to intermediate levels of usage. Expect the following:

• Intro to basics of imaging as they relate to editing photos.
• Some basic setups info for The GIMP, including,
  • Setup and layout,
  • Short-cut keys.
• Demonstrations of editing tools for basic and intermediate operations.
• Tips and tricks.
• Q & A.
• How to get The GIMP

Attendees will be expected to be familiar with basics of using Linux, e.g., file management, etc.