October Meeting: Octave Scientific Programming Language

When:

Thursday, October 16, 2025 @ 7:00pm

Where:

Wright State University
Russ Engineering Center, Room 302 (or 348)

We will also have an online presence via the Zoom web conferencing service.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87602254357
Meeting ID: 876 0225 4357

If joining a meeting from a Windows PC, the Zoom client will automagically download and attempt to install. For those using Linux, you can download the free (not Free) Zoom client from this page. It’s available for a variety of distributions.

For those attending in person, we will most likely adjourn to Milano’s afterward for food and socializing.

Presentations/Topics:

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

September Meeting: Performance Monitoring with SAR

When:

Thursday, September 18, 2025 @ 7:00pm

Where:

Wright State University
Russ Engineering Center, Room 302 (or 348)

We will also have an online presence via the Zoom web conferencing service.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87602254357
Meeting ID: 876 0225 4357

If joining a meeting from a Windows PC, the Zoom client will automagically download and attempt to install. For those using Linux, you can download the free (not Free) Zoom client from this page. It’s available for a variety of distributions.

For those attending in person, we will most likely adjourn to Milano’s afterward for food and socializing.

Presentations/Topics:

SAR, or System Activity Report, is a command-line utility in Linux used for collecting, reporting, and saving system activity information. It is a powerful tool for monitoring and analyzing various performance metrics of a Linux system. Mike Linden will demo the typical uses of SAR for us.

We’ll also talk about our upcoming Installfest on October 4th.

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.

SAR Presentation Slides: https://linux.dma1.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/SAR-presentation.pdf

August Meeting: Open Discussion

When:

Thursday, August 21, 2025 @ 7:00pm

Where:

Wright State University
Russ Engineering Center, Room 302

We will also have an online presence via the Zoom web conferencing service.
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87602254357
Meeting ID: 876 0225 4357

If joining a meeting from a Windows PC, the Zoom client will automagically download and attempt to install. For those using Linux, you can download the free (not Free) Zoom client from this page. It’s available for a variety of distributions.

For those attending in person, we will most likely adjourn to Milano’s afterward for food and socializing.

Presentations/Topics:

We don’t have any specific topic for this month, so let’s just have an open discussion time. Linux and Open Source news, projects you’re working on, and questions for the rest of the group – it’s all fair game! If you have ideas for future programs or activities, we’ll have time to talk about those as well.