BSD - Sha'ul Baptie Presenting

Our next monthly meeting will take place on Monday, May 26, 2014, from 7:00 - 10:00pm, in Room 7000, SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street, in Vancouver.

Our meeting this month will focus on the BSD operating systems. BSD, or Berkeley Software Distribution, and occasionally Berkeley Unix, is not Linux, although it is a sister Open Source operating system and can utilize a great deal of GNU/Linux software.

Our speaker will be Sha'ul Baptie. Sha'ul has been a computer hobbyist for more than two decades. He first taught himself to program web pages in the nineties and then became interested in operating systems. He first tried GNU/Linux about ten years ago, experimenting with many different distros and then slowly gravitated to BSD because of its simple, although never easy, nature, and it's development as a whole operating system. He's been using FreeBSD and OpenBSD for a quite a while and is comfortable with both, although he prefers OpenBSD due to the quality and correctness of its code and the primary emphasis on security.

Sha`ul will discuss the history of BSD and it's ties to the original Unix source code, including it's evolution. He will provide us with a a general outline of the technologies unique to BSD such as the pf firewall, ports vs packages, the OS development process, the work on ZFS and the distinctions between the different BSD distros. He will also analyze a BSD installation and show how and why it is updated in a terminal. At first glance it may seem complicated but Sha`ul will reveal its underlying simplicity.

As usual, we will have a book raffle and adjourn to Steamworks for drinks afterwards.

So come on out, meet some friends, support your local user group and learn something new.