Linux Users of Victoria ("LUV") is a Linux User Group ("LUG") based in the state of

Victoria, Australia Victoria is a state in southeastern Australia. It is the second-smallest state with a land area of , the second most populated state (after New South Wales) with a population of over 6.5 million, and the most densely populated state in Au ...

. One of the largest and oldest Linux User Groups in

Australia Australia, officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a Sovereign state, sovereign country comprising the mainland of the Australia (continent), Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous List of islands of Australia, sma ...

, it was incorporated in 1993 as a

not for profit A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

group. It now has close to fifteen hundred members. It used to have regional SIGs but they are currently inactive. Meetings are held on the first Tuesday of the month via Jitsi or BBB. The committee is democratically elected each year in advance of the Annual General Meeting using free election software calle
MemberDB
The positions are President, Vice-President, Secretary and Treasurer, as well as four ordinary committee members - the current committee members are listed on the website. Sources added: On November 29, 2003, according to

Sydney Morning Herald ''The Sydney Morning Herald'' (''SMH'') is a daily compact newspaper published in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and owned by Nine. Founded in 1831 as the ''Sydney Herald'', the ''Herald'' is the oldest continuously published newspaper i ...

, LUV is one of the two Linux user groups based in Melbourne, and they held an installfest—a group meeting where new users are given assistance how to install Linux on their PC. In 2008, the then-president of LUV, Andrew Chalmers, co-signed a letter to

Julia Gillard Julia Eileen Gillard (born 29 September 1961) is an Australian former politician who served as the 27th prime minister of Australia from 2010 to 2013, holding office as leader of the Australian Labor Party (ALP). She is the first and only ...

, MP Deputy

Prime Minister of Australia The prime minister of Australia is the head of government of the Commonwealth of Australia. The prime minister heads the executive branch of the Australian Government, federal government of Australia and is also accountable to Parliament of A ...

and Minister for Education, requesting that the government advocates the use of free and open source software in schools, so that the $1000 of government funding aimed at buying a computer for each secondary school student will be spent more effectively. In 2008, LUV also participated in the

software freedom day Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software organized by the Digital Freedom Foundation (DFF). SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and enc ...

and held local events; one of the local event organizers, Donna Benjamin, commented the event is a "Think Global, Act Local" celebration. In April 2021, Russell Coker, a participant at LUV's mailing list, commented that the

Bureau of Meteorology The Bureau of Meteorology (BOM or BoM) is an executive agency of the Australian Government responsible for providing weather services to Australia and surrounding areas. It was established in 1906 under the Meteorology Act, and brought together ...

blocking text based

web browsers A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a User (computing), user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its Computer file, files from a web server and then displays the page on the user' ...

, such as

lynx A lynx is a type of wild cat. Lynx may also refer to: Astronomy * Lynx (constellation) * Lynx (Chinese astronomy) * Lynx X-ray Observatory, a NASA-funded mission concept for a next-generation X-ray space observatory Places Canada * Lynx, Ontar ...

and

w3m w3m is a free software/ open source text-based web browser and terminal pager. It has support for tables, frames, SSL connections, color, and inline images on suitable terminals. Generally, it renders pages in a form as true to their origi ...

, unnecessarily made it difficult for about half the people using braille readers to access the site. These text browsers would allow them to use text to speech engines to retrieve the site content, such as climate information and weather forecasts. LUV have been called "Australia's best known and most active open source community".

References

External links

*{{official, http://www.luv.asn.au/ Linux user groups Non-profit organisations based in Australia