The HLUG International Software Freedom Day event will be taking place  on Saturday September 15th 2012 at All Saints Church, High St. Hereford HR4 9AA. This year our event will be family-focussed with kids’ activities, workshops and free facepainting. We will have free CD’s and goodies  to give away plus lots of info and advice on all things Linux and Open Source. The Raspberry Pi will be making an appearance with demo’s and a chance at hands on activities and there will be plenty of opportunity for kids, parents and teachers to have a look at Tuxedu the open source linux distribution developed by HLUG for children.

We’ve also got plenty of information for small businesses who would like to see what Open Source Software has to offer and our experienced and friendly HLUG volunteers will be happy to demo programs and show you what the options are to proprietary formats.

Students off to college may also want to pop in to have a look at the great  Open Source software which exists  – it’s high quality and free to use and share – weve listed a few of the ones we use regularly here.  Most of them are cross platform which means they work on LInux, Windows or Mac.

Our Guest Speakers are:

12 noon : Paula Graham from Fossbox, London – speaking on *Make your TV smarter for less* – making a media centre on an Ubuntu box with XBMC. Paula is the founder of Fossbox and an open source advocate, she is also one of the Flossie Collective. Flossie is an organisation for women involved with creating, using and promoting Free and Libre Software and it’s first conference was held in London this year.
2pm: Sean Tohill, Senior Lecturer, School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Westminster. speaking on security. Sean’s specialities are computer security and forensics – whatever level of computer user we are we should be concerned about digital security so Sean’s talk should be an interesting and informative one.

The event is as usual free and run on a drop-in basis so you can call in at any point throughout the day. Our venue (which is  fully accessible) All Saints is in the centre of Hereford and has a fantastic cafe that sells very good coffee and delicious locally sourced food. We are within walking distance of the railway and bus stations and a short stroll from Hereford Cathedral which houses the famous Mappa Mundi so why not combine a visit to our event with some shopping and sightseeing in the city.