Meetings are free for everyone to participate in and are very informal. Most meetings are just gatherings but sometimes we will have a presentation followed by a Q&A session. Presentations range from beginners level to technical.

There are 2 kinds of meetings and they rotate month-to-month. Meetings generally start at 6:00pm on the third Wednesday of each month.

The primary meetings are held at the Main Branch of the Siouxland Libraries in Downtown Sioux Falls. This is the space for getting everyone in one room and having presentations. These run from 6pm to 8pm.

The casual meetings are currently being held at the Full Circle Book Coop. These meetings are for chatting with other members or getting feedback and help for that upcoming presentation you are working on. These are from 6pm to 10pm.

Stay tuned to the mailing list and IRC channel for exact details.

Here is an archive of past meeting minutes.

Here is a list of topics for anyone looking for something to do a presentation on:

  • setting up a dokuwiki or other small wiki for documentation
  • setting up a monitoring system like nagios or zabbix or http://omdistro.org/
  • a pbx distro like elastix
  • virtual machines
  • containers
  • setting up a python environment
  • network troubleshooting tools like mtr and wireshark/tcpdump
  • os troubleshooting tools like strace, ps, top, io monitoring etc.
  • openvpn
  • a discussion on home fileservers
  • steam and linux games
  • Graylog log analysis
  • getting pfsense to send coherent syslog to remote server (Graylog) for processing.
  • making pfsense and Graylog work together to auto-block attacks aimed at any part of your network (eg block bots trying to brute force into ssh)
  • android virtual devices
  • odroid laptop build with Motorola lapdock
  • algorithmic password managers
  • window managers
  • cross-distro package managers? Flatpak / snappy
  • nix / guix
  • wayland / mir / arcan / state-of-x
  • Containers / cgroups
  • alternative linux distro for mobile phones
  • openstack
  • what hardware problems do we have
  • privacy
  • security & paranoia
  • cheap, tiny hardware – are we arduino-ing? pi-ing?
  • For what desktop applications categories does linux still lag behind?
  • your favorite shell / terminal
  • nonfree codecs & plugins - are we just installing them, or are we purists
  • laptop hardware. dell, system 76, etc?
  • purism?
  • power management - any tricks for reducing idle power for always on HTPCs? tricks for keeping laptop batteries new and long running?
  • application sandboxing?
  • dbus?
  • systemd
  • kvm
  • coreos / alpine linux, anyone?
  • containers on the desktop?
  • do licenses matter?
  • HTPC hardware and software config… how are we keeping our hardware quiet?
  • how and why are we using linux? home? work?
  • commercial / non-free paid linux apps we are using?
  • linux hosting providers and paas that we use?
  • What’s up with microsoft? Do we like them now? Do we run msft things on linux? if so, how?
  • OS X apps on linux? Anyone got anything working?
  • State of wine? Windows 10 apps working on Linux?
  • core infrastructure initiative
  • how have cloud services liberated or chained us as linux users?
  • evangelism: do we want more slug linux members? if so, how do we reach out to the community?
  • software development: what languages, tools, and tricks have we found on linux?
  • language-specific package managers…. how do you live with npm / pip / gem / etc and the native package managers? how do we manage concurrent versions of libraries and vms – e.g. ruby 1.9 and 2.0 on the same system– without the gnashing of teeth?
  • linux / open source podcasts? blogs? news sites?
  • IoT ? Home automation? embedded projects? linux gadgets?
  • any new fun distros out there?