Ideas for things we can do in Linux club.

• Workshops, talks, projects, etc.
• People to reach out to for talks/workshops

Meta:

• tags: ProjectIdea, PresentationIdea (talk or workshop), WorkshopIdea, TalkIdea
• tags: [?] questionable,

We will need surveys and/or to talk with several members about their ideas and what they want out of the club. My survey failed last time, maybe directly reaching out to people who chat in the Discord would be better. To survive purely off lecture-y (mostly one person speaking, with questions) talks and workshops would require consistent high-quality presentations, novel and interesting topics, and notable special guests. This is an acceptable target and path forward for the club, from my understanding this is most of what Cybersecurity Club does, and it is great.

Projects are great if there are people interested in working on them. "Linux Club" does not sound like and probably shouldn't be a purely-project-focused club. If we want to shift a bit in that direction, we should focus on a few specific projects, and mention them in advertising materials so some members will be joining with the desire to work on them. I think the ideal would be that most projects can eventually be considered "finished" (even if more could be added, at least have an accomplishable version of the goal; perhaps with a little ongoing maintenance), and that they could be finished within a semester or year.
— Jeffrey Fisher

Linux Club projects can be collaborative, and we can support each other's projects as well. -- Skylar

Presentations/workshops

General people to reach out to for talks/workshops

• UMD faculty
  • Knowledge of operating systems, kernels.
  • Experience with doing interesting things with Unix. Computer clusters. Faculty working on UMD's clusters.

General ideas

• Reach out to and develop relationship with companies, organizations for funding, etc.
  • Might be able to help members get jobs/internships. Perhaps focus on systems administration / cloud, kernel (companies that hire people to work on open-source kernels), operating systems, whatever members are interested in (could include software development if no need to focus on Linux/Unix-related stuff)
  • Might be able to get server hosting as a sponsorship from a company.
• Reach out to other university Linux clubs / LUGs.
• Presence at UMD hackathons: Technica (fall), Bitcamp (spring)
  • Workshops/presentations

General "content" ideas

• Lightning talks (5-10 min) or short talks, fit many in a meeting.
  • Created/presented by members, not necessarily officers.

General topic ideas

• Self-hosting / Unix server management.
• Ricing/customization of desktop environment, shell, apps
• Relation and uses of Linux for programming
• Scripting. Shell (POSIX/Bourne sh, Bash/zsh, Fish), scripting languages.
  • xdotool
  • Desktop environment: dmenu/rofi
• Cluster computing. Get started with virtual machines. Maybe could do something with Raspberry Pi's or similarly cheap hardware.
• Rabbit holes. Be careful! Probably shouldn't be the focus of the club as they are often strongly matters of opinion, even the people who like that sort of thing don't like it because they like an alternative. Perhaps present several of these together as a taste, or only do a full meeting on this sort of thing if interest among many members.
  • Vim, Emacs
• "Uncommon" but uniquely useful software
  • ZFS / btrfs
  • Nix(OS), GNU Guix
  • any BSD
  • Android ROMS (Lineage/GrapheneOS)
• Tutorials for doing things with specific Linux-related software. For example, Libreoffice, GIMP, music production, etc.
• Tutorials for Linux programming. For example, PyGTK, PyQT, etc.

Miscellaneous specific topic ideas

• From-scratch learning. Arch, debootstrap; minimal installs; Linux From Scratch (LFS).
• How to run stuff that's not packaged for your distribution. Combination of virtual machines, Distrobox, chroot, proot, containers/Docker/Podman.
  • If there's any other wrappers similar to Distrobox, investigate those.
  • Perhaps include WINE, Steam/Proton here. Perhaps include Nix / Guix.
  • Packaging tutorial, although this will usually be distro-specific.
• Living the *nix lifestyle
  • RSS
  • Plaintext email
  • GPG keys
  • Static websites
  • Markup languages (Markdown, Org, Asciidoc, RST, etc)
  • Avoiding horror stories (rm -rf /, etc)
  • Specialized hardware (mechanical keyboards, retro and mobile computing)
• Linux Trivia Kahoot
• Maintaining your Linux machine:
  • Security. Hardening, updates.
  • Tour of options with pros and cons: stable, cutting-edge, bleeding-edge.
• Backup and data management workshop and/or presentation
  • Potential tools to involve: Borgbackup, Restic, rsync, git-annex, ZFS/btrfs, syncthing
• Workshop on packaging software
  • DEB, RPM, Arch PKGBUILD, Nix/Guix, etc.

PresentationIdea: Introduction to software licensing

Projects

ProjectIdea: Software use survey

Linux benchmarking

• Improve on Phoronix's benchmarks

Club self-hosting

• [?] Shared server. See: https://sdf.org/, https://tildeverse.org/, Paul Ford's blog post about tilde.club
• [?] Virtual Private Network (VPN). Perhaps DNS (see: https://tildenic.org/). Shared server just strong enough to run a VPN (centralized or if peer-to-peer the server would be for NAT-punching or whatever), then members can connect their own local hardware or remote servers to it.

Contacting the UMD mirror team

Events

[?] Install-fest

Apparently this is the largest event of the year for other university Linux user groups. This should be done at the beginning of the semester when students are taking new classes that may require installing Linux.

Rice contest

Have people customize their Linux desktop and vote on who has the best rice.

Office hours/troubleshooting/project hacking

Have people come in and ask questions about fixing their Linux boxes or hacking on projects. They can join voice chat too. More chill than other presentations, nothing needs to be specifically planned for this.

Host a hackathon

Host a Linux hackathon. In years past, there would be a twist in the hackathon where the wifi would be cut so people would have to resort to local backups of StackOverflow, Wikipedia, etc.

[?] 30-year anniversary party

https://listserv.umd.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind2302&L=UM-LINUX&P=674

Linux video game night

Play some games on Steam with Proton, or native Linux games like Super Tux Kart and BSD Games.