VTLUUG

The LUUG will be having a “business meeting,” holding elections and briefly discussing plans for next year on next Tuesday, April 28^th in 236 Squires Student Center beginning at 7:30pm. Time permitting there will be a lightning talk on everyday cryptography followed by a key signing party if folks are interested. This will be the last real-life meeting of the semester, but I encourage everyone to stay in touch via the IRC channel, forum and wiki.

The next LUUG meeting take place this coming Tuesday, April 21st, in 238 Squires Student Center from 8:30 to 10:30pm. Please note the change of location from previous meetings in Johnston Student Center. Professor Godmar Back from the Computer Science department will be giving a case-by-case description of some problems he has had to solve for himself and for students, and show how the GNU Debugger was helpful in doing it. Since GDB is not always the right tool, he may include a discussion of other debugging tools such as LD_PRELOAD, Valgrind, strace, or gprof.

Thanks to everyone who came out on the 24th to the Linux Studio talk and thanks especially to Dr. Bukvic for the awesome presentation. One of the really interesting topics that came up was the laptop orchestra. Below is the abstract from a whitepaper describing the group.

Founded by Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic, DISIS Linux Laptop Orchestra (L²Ork) is
the latest addition to the VT Music Department’s rich ensemble tradition that
seamlessly integrates Arts and Sciences by cross-pollinating centuries of
collaborative tradition of the Western orchestra with contemporary creative
technologies. L²Ork, with its unique aesthetics, does not require years of
musical training and as such its members will ideally consist of students
and faculty of diverse professional backgrounds. Likewise, its research
potential as a tightly integrated, tried, and tested collaborative
environment will offer an invaluable rapid prototyping sandbox for scholars
and educators alike.

L²Ork currently seeks students who wish to participate in the engineering
phase set for the summer of 2009: developing software frameworks, fine-tuning the netbook
Linux deployment, and engineering supporting infrastructure such as the
hemispherical speaker systems. They will be mentored by Dr. Bukvic
(Music/DISIS/CCTAD) and Dr. Tom Martin (ECE).

L²Ork is also seeking students interested in enrolling in the fall ensemble
pilot curriculum where they will have an opportunity to engage in
collaborative projects involving L²Ork, including composition, research,
software development, and performance of new works specifically designed for
the ensemble. For additional info please contact Dr. Bukvic <ico@vt.edu>.
For more info on DISIS please visit http://disis.music.vt.edu

There will be a tour of Virginia Tech’s Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio on Saturday, March 21st at 2:00 pm. DISIS does some interesting work related to sustainable silent computing, touchless gesturing and multimedia interactivity, sound synthesis and more. Linux and UNIX are an essential parts of the infrastructure at the studio. Of their 12 workstations, 4 run Ubuntu and 4 run OS X.

Dr. Ivica Ico Bukvic, who will be giving the tour, has given keynote speeches at Linux audio conferences and is currently the director of the Linuxaudio.org consortium.

The tour will start at 2:00 pm on Saturday afternoon. The studio is located just off of campus between Main Street and Draper Road. PDF directions are available from the DISIS website.

If you would like to help publicize for the event, tell all your friends about it and invite them to the Facebook event.

The LUUG has reservations for one 10′ x 10′ space with two tables at the Student Technology Council’s Engineering Technology Showcase coming up on Tuesday, March 31st from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm in Squires Commonwealth.

If you are interested in donating your time or hardware for the event, please make a quick post on the Engineering Technology Showcase Hardware and Time thread on the forum. That’s also a good place to make general suggestions or criticism about the LUUG hosting a booth alongside student design teams and corporate vendors.

If you have suggestions as to what we should be handing out in terms of CDs and literature, please post on the ETS Handouts thread.

I’m really excited about this chance to get out there and spread the Linux/UNIX/FOSS love. I know we can make this a success, especially if everyone pitches in with their specialty here and there.