> We'll make sure there is a laptop ready for you <diatribe>
A good rule of thumb for presentations is that if you haven't rehearsed exactly what you're planning to do, on exactly the same hardware and software and network and display that you're going to use, the presentation is not going to work. That's a mighty concatenation of "exactlys", but each has clobbered at least one presentation in the past year; some talks have taken several shots below the waterline in the span of a few minutes. Heck, just putzing with X / backgrounds / fonts / colors to get a marginally acceptable projector display is good for maybe ten minutes right up front. While it's amusing to watch increasingly flamboyant / desperate acts of sysadmin derring-do, half an hour of gymnastics kills any hope of a coherent presentation. I don't have a spare box right now (pesky lightning!), but perhaps we should take up a collection for a crash test dummy machine from eBay / somebody's closet that each presenter can configure / rehearse with as needed -before- P-Day. Ten bucks a head from the regular crowd would buy a perfectly acceptable white-box or obsolete Dell. Then, if someone could document a known-good configuration that matched the library's network, a known-good configuration for the projector, and a known-good list of desktop settings to produce a legible display, and tape those to the top of the box, that'd be really great. </diatribe> -- Ed _______________________________________________ Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group http://mhvlug.org http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm) MHVLS Auditorium Feb 6 - DBUS Mar 5 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using Linux
