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Re: [Haifux] Random idea about W2L: "Purely" Evangelistic Demos

Orna Agmon
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 21:53:27 -0700

> Most people who are going to attend the first lecture have heard about
> Linux, know it is an alternative OS to Windows. What they do wish to see,

Nope. About half of them are very familiar with Linux, others may even be
at a point where they do not know what an operating system _is_ at
all.

> is what kind of cool things you can do with it. I believe most of them
> heard that it could do things only remotely imaginable in Windows, in half
> the time, with very good results, and for free. (as in free beer)
>
> 1. Gimp stuff. Now subtitute Gimp with Sketch or Kontour, or whatever.

will you compare it to Photoshop, for example?

> 2. How to write and process HTML forms. Not too much explaining the
> minute details of Perl or PHP but rather a proof of concept approach.

And here is where people will jump with the Frontpage, asking things like-
in Frontpage I press here and there, can you do it this easily?


> 3. Toying with KDE and stuff. (shameless plug: the kpat Freecell solving
> display is very cool, IMO. ;-))
> 4. Doing things with Bash (real scripts). (I can show that, but it seems
> like Nadav is the natural selection). I'm choosing Bask and not zsh
> because bash is the de-facto shell. And tcsh is pretty much useless on the
> command line.
> 5. Downloading a program from the Internet and compiling it, installing it
> and running it. Yes, configure games. Yes, open-source. Yes, power!
> 6. Installing stuff from RPMs (for good measure). Again, it is usually
> straightforward.
> 7. Creating professional documents with LaTeX. I can also show it, but I
> think I should out-source things to others.

And it is better than Latex for Windows because???


> 8. Mastering the Internet. Some people don't make good use of it, even if
> they are very experienced Windows Netters.
> 9. Multimedia in Real-Time. Alon?

Good ideas.

> I don't think anyone wishes to learn Linux in 6 meetings or that we can
> possibly teach them that. But we can give them a taste of why Linux is so
> cool, and why we think so. I think we can do it in 3 2-hour meetings. When
> we will dedicate one hour or possibly less for every demonstration theme.

We are doing Welcome to Linux here, not Welcome to Applications.
There are a lot of good applications for Windows, and if you start a
contest like that, I am not sure you win. And I do not think People come
to hear about applications. It is way too general for beginners to be able
to really listen and learn at this point, like (I admit) I could not
concentrate on the ADSL howto before I found myself facing a machine which
needed to use ADSL. Then I remembered where to find the HOWTO, and that is
all.

Bottom line: it is too much for a beginners lecture, and the W2L is
rather long as it is. A small part of this should go into the first
lecture, which was done without a computer at all last time.

Orna.


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