Welcome to the Dayton Linux Users Group

Ben Kendrick will lead a discussion on Open Source self-hosting sustainability for small organizations:

“I recently began setting up my local historical society with local cloud resources (Nextcloud) as they begin digitization projects of the documents/artifacts in their collection.  With the board we had several discussions on independent vs dependent IT strategy for the organization. Essentially, do we go with a known tech giant for storage, management, and sharing of digital files or do it ourselves? The decision was to do it ourselves (me really) because the cost could be lower without all of the subscriptions that would be necessary. I could share the basic presentation for background.

“A discussion I would like to have: How do I, as the person setting all of this up, put processes into place so that when I am gone, the organization can continue to run independently with Open Source software. I am not looking for a discussion/argument on which software to use, but more looking at good practice processes around keeping a small organization running.”

We’ll also talk about the recent OLF conference, and Stephen Hinton will go over plans for our booth at TechFest in February.

As always, we’ll also have discussion time for Linux and Open Source news, projects you’re working on, and questions for the rest of the group.

X2Go enables you to access a graphical desktop of a computer (usually running Linux) over a low bandwidth (or high bandwidth) connection, using SSH for security. You can connect from a computer running Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X.

Combining X2Go with pm-suspend & gWakeOnLAN, DLUG member and frequent presenter JMB has created quite a neat setup for remote access, which he will present and demonstrate live.

We’ll also talk about the upcoming OLF conference on December 6th, and start to plan our booth at TechFest next February.

As always, we’ll also have discussion time for Linux and Open Source news, projects you’re working on, and questions for the rest of the group.

Presentation Slides: https://linux.dma1.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/X2Go.pdf
Reference: https://wiki.debian.org/ThomasChung/X2GODesktopSharing#Add_Users_to_Desktop_Sharing_Group

GNU Octave is a free, open source alternative to the commercial software ‘Matlab’.  It provides an interpreted programming language for numerical computations.  It is highly compatible (~95%) with Matlab syntax and functions.  With a BSD-style license, it works on Linux, macOS & Windows.

JMB will briefly share his past experience in using Octave for very complex calculations of a gas ejector, replicating a doctoral thesis that used Matlab.  Octave was proven to be equally capable in reproducing the same results / graphs.  Octave was also used by the presenter for real-time thermodynamic mass, energy & heat flow calculations for a recreational vehicle (RV) refrigerator system, combining it with ‘CoolProp’ (the open source alternative to the NIST ‘RefProp’) library for thermodynamic properties of fluids.  These refrigerators are usually NH3 absorption systems with no moving parts, thus require very complex chemical process calculations.

The presenter will show how to install and use Octave, using simple examples including plotting graphs; ending hopefully in a live demo of a working Octave setup.

We’ll also talk about the Installfest we held on October 4th, the upcoming OLF conference, and the just-opened TechFest registrations.

As always, we’ll also have discussion time for Linux and Open Source news, projects you’re working on, and questions for the rest of the group.

Presentation Slides: https://linux.dma1.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/DaytonLUG-Octave.pdf