Adir Abraham
Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:54:42 -0700
On Thu, 11 Apr 2002, Shlomi Fish wrote: > > 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, Define "alternative". If we're talking about the newbies section (at least that's the audience which I'll refer to in this email), I believe that most of them only heard about its existance. That that it is an alternative (a real one), I kind of doubt it that they have heard. > 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) Again.. you are robbed. You want them "to hear in advance" that it is perfect, it's amazing, it's working, and you don't need Windows at all. In that case, someone else did the work, and not us. Moreover, it is working "with very good results" (sorry to dissapoint you that there are too many who still get the feeling that it is "too difficult" for them, so we have to show them that it is easy (= in half the time), working without crashes (= with very good results), and the money part... Unless you are a real "loyal citizen", you won't buy your Windows product (I assume that I'm not "discovering America" here, if to be honest), so most of them won't really care that it is free. Bottom line - you want this to be easy, and I promise you - it won't be. > > I think we should show it to them in action. Demonstrations like: > > 1. Gimp stuff. Now subtitute Gimp with Sketch or Kontour, or whatever. We're talking about a very specific audience that *might* get interested in seeing that. I wonder how that will help us to thrill the *mass*. > 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. HTML forms? All you need is a vi/emacs/pico/whatever, and on the Windows case it is a notepad/wordpad/word/whatever. HTML has nothing to do with Linux (directly and specifically, that is!). I even assume that newbies, who wish to start their way with Linux and designing/creating Internet sites, will want some tool who will do part of the job (the dirty HTMLing job, I mean) for them, so they will see that "it is working". Afterwards, taking a piece of paper (in any OS) is the little part. For the scripting lovers, Perl or PHP would be a good idea, but again, if we're talking about newbies, it should be "an introduction to an introduction to Perl/PHP", since you want to show them the product, what it is good for, and why to do it in Linux (there's no reason why you can't write all the stuff you wish to write in Perl for Windows, and then to leave it there or to put it in your beloved Linux machine). You see - many questions, and not so many (immidiate) answers. > 3. Toying with KDE and stuff. (shameless plug: the kpat Freecell solving > display is very cool, IMO. ;-)) Toying is not something that has some advantage in KDE, in my opinion. The opposite - in this case, Windows' desktop does have a big "advantage" (at the toys background ;) So to show that KDE can do something that Windows can do, might give us an own goal. > 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. I wonder how that will help to the *newbies*... ? > 5. Downloading a program from the Internet and compiling it, installing it > and running it. Yes, configure games. Yes, open-source. Yes, power! Ok, that's a good idea. We do want to show them how to install stuff. This is very relevant for newbies. > 6. Installing stuff from RPMs (for good measure). Again, it is usually > straightforward. Basic RPMing.. yep, that too. > 7. Creating professional documents with LaTeX. I can also show it, but I > think I should out-source things to others. This may also interest a very specific audience. Note, that we do hope that such an audience will arrive. We're already talking about two different groups (LaTeX users, and Gimp users), and the intersection of them might leave us without people :) It won't bother us, unless we want all the audience to get interested in (almost) every lecture that we will give. A "loyal audience", that is. > 8. Mastering the Internet. Some people don't make good use of it, even if > they are very experienced Windows Netters. What do you mean by "mastering the Internet"..? Are you talking about "wide ranged knowledge"? In that case, every person has its own interest of depth, and even then, it won't necessarily arrive from the OS part (so even if they use Linux, it won't be too relevant for them). > 9. Multimedia in Real-Time. Alon? That's also a good idea. > > > Note that we should not lie by saying that everything is as > straightforward as it seems. We will tell them time and again, that > getting everything (especially the GUI part) to work flawlessly can be a > daunting task. But it is worth it. We can actually show them how some > things don't behave as they may expect it, or simply tell them why we did > something wrong, when something does go wrong. To tell them "time and again", Shlomi, will create opposite results. We have to convince them (one, good shot, which will make the audience to actually getting interested in what you're saying). The question is how? > > 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. People will want to see things working, fast (even if they don't work well. See the other OS, for instance). So, if you want to start any convincing process, you have to show them "real working stuff", and fast. In this case, we can either put the demonstrations in the middle of the explaination, or to split it to 50%, while on the first part we'll have the theory part, and on the second part only demonstrations. If we do want it to get into their blood and quicker, in my opinion the first way (demonstration after every sub-subject explained) is the best thing to do. Another thing (even if this may sound ironic) - we have to organize the lecture 15-60 minutes before it begins, if we do want things to work without any problem (see the last Hebrew lecture, for instance). We probably don't mind about it, as members of our own club, but if you show that to a newbie, you will just give him "yet another good reason" of why Linux is bad(not). > > If you ask me, it makes me drool just of seeing anybody demonstrate what I > do on a day to day basis. And somethings even I don't know how to do. What you may drool from, may get others to run away from.. (vice versa!). You have to interest the new people first, and the question is how to do it in the best way. In addition to that, there are things that new people do and you don't do (anymore), such as not being used to Linux and the way it works, or trying to do something not trivial (or not trivial for them), while for you it's trivial.. Unfortunately, some of us simply don't tolerate "too trivial questions". Well, we're talking about newbies, and we have to help them, or at least to be very directive. We have to build the shield, first. That means to make them curious, in order to make them trying figure it out what it is all about (= it's not a such a big problem as it may look like in the first place, at all) and for you to get questions afterwards (and to focus the audience on what you're saying). Think about it :) > > Regards, > > Shlomi Fish > > -- ____________________________________________________________________________ Adir Abraham Technion's Advisors Group and Public PC Farms Manager [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] Haifa, Israel ICQ# 1841481 Cel# +972-53-243438, +972-55-481245 KeyID: 0xD8DC85C7 Fingerprint: 138D 8F41 7A06 44A0 3DBB 9DC3 FE8B 2658 ____________________________________________________________________________ -----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> mQEPAzLax/sAAAEIAK2bI8utornDYd5LdU+/TABNmqXneiXuLx4j8OKD2GjfS/O8 E6nrX69ot4uU5ryjp5h+7VHBZqCQz+8VC8ly2ANtycejAc82gllVC96fbA+Y6uuN uI9aXkwNqhphmmQZIVaOZDRAo9//1zX9r41xY+8rKSQuNcp+FPD/A5Itng0xhsfS KkCV4tT0mGpiydUHFrugk/bouXPYwUHXSnHp/mPdGsjgqipezHPzCWIn3xcJjk2/ tjd5/ym+arWpKW5nvTuvalcMi2DIcEilSrT5NLwgeuh3eqitYOc9WTiMNMvUiVcP sucJkdxNwjEX9MgD/bLY9wT/13brqxk71tjchccAEQEAAbQnQWRpciBBYnJhaGFt IDxhZGlyQHZpcGUudGVjaG5pb24uYWMuaWw+iQEVAwUQMtrH+6sZO9bY3IXHAQGb 0gf9FwrJBKaTP0yvf3+vwtB+9ftS0woz1TawJwflC5EoHJs7D/5GzkAaRV82RSkH P9fSHmM+LUB0huBBK1qtNyXHWIjQTmYwFYC8Oen4q0Fyze7cloSnpD1rVjI0HoCO UU8bbz0Iseizdjhnl2PTItQ+dkKzLcww1jW5iPXOWd1o8/8s2aebhrpDRO8BfAYg H29jhmDtuVQDPgFfkN/kP+xpHQplMN5Qh1oP22f+Wyg8sVvSv8P7cM+88u46FHi3 zvHpVnZKIBtKhksnH1PYXtz7FvS7vA+MbpM47kgmQGL5Ygig0pUUbBCGlzmg2Hvd 262YCdVYNwpIjQWBLJI8orea0Q== =dgNP -----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK----- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Haifa Linux Club Mailing List (http://linuxclub.il.eu.org) To unsub send an empty message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]