Starting at the beginning of C-term, WPILA meetings have included a new feature. Each meeting now begins with a brief presentation by a WPILA officer, member, or guest speaker on a Linux-related topic. Presentation topics are suggested by club members, most often in the areas of Linux beginners' topics, technical issues of Linux and Unix system operation, and tutorials for some of the more interesting, powerful, and productive programs and libraries available for Unix-like systems. Weeks one and two featured presentations by WPILA president Dan Murphy on the topics of simple shell programming and Unix Makefiles. Week three will feature a presentation by WPILA secretary George Caswell on Guile, a powerful software extension library, with an additional, brief introduction to the GIMP, a free Photoshop-like graphics editing package. Upcoming, planned presentations include more extensive introductions to the GIMP, as well as powerful Unix-based editors, and the available user-friendly productivity software available for Unix systems. The WPI Linux Association hopes these presentations will help anyone who needs to use Unix in their coursework to use it more effectively, and that the presentations will complement those of other groups, such as the WPI Association for Computing Machinery.
The WPI Linux Association holds weekly meetings every Monday at 7PM in Fuller Labs room 311. WPILA additionally holds monthly joint meetings with the Worcester Linux Users Group - the next of these is Thursday, February 18th, at 7PM in Kinnicutt Hall. WPILA is a peer education and mutual support group: new members are always welcome, no dues or other membership obligations apply. Contact wpila@wpi.edu or see http://www.wpi.edu/~wpila for more information.