A few years ago
I gave a talk on Open Source to the Committee of Seniornet Canterbury.

It explained some of the basic mechanics of what FLOSS was all about and
what was available to the likes of them.

I suppose that they were pretty knowledgeable because they were on their
respective committees so they gave me a pretty good grilling afterwards.

Many of them also said that they had never heard of the concepts of
which I spoke. From what I saw, there would probably be a reasonable
amount of interest, certainly not 100% but a reasonable number of the
tutors and volunteers might be amenable.

[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

<snip>

> 
> I would stick to a good gui based installation, maybe mepis or ubuntu, and
> show them firefox, konqueror, a couple of email clients, and programs to
> do whatever else they use their computers for. In fact I'd want to do a
> small survey before the meeting as to what they all use their computers
> for, and aim to show them the relevant bits. I'd also say that if, say, 4
> or more wanted to have linux installed a team of us would come to the next
> meeting and sort them out.

Yes showing a bunch of people like the Seniornet people the command-line
is just a recipe for getting rid of most of them.

Just demonstrating how they could do their present computer work on a
free system does seem like a good idea.

One particularly popular activity is genealogy.
I don't know what is available for Linux though.



-- 
Zane Gilmore, Analyst / Programmer
Information Services Section, Information Technology Dept,
University of Canterbury - Te Whare Waananga o Waitaha
Private Bag 4800,
Christchurch New Zealand  Phone +64-3-364 2987 extn 7895

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