On Tue, 2003-07-08 at 22:21, Adam Bower wrote:
the lines of "I feel I would get more out of meetings if" or "Would someone please give a talk on how a linux system starts and stops itself and the details of some of the bits inbetween"
Actually that sounds like an extremely interesting thing to do, perhaps soon we can have a discussion starting with what a system does when you turn it on, and see how far we get in the course of an afternoon. The people who know less (eg yours truely) get to listen and ask questions and the people who know more get to chip in information and tips. Adam, would you mind leading a discussion like that? All we'd need is a machine to demonstrate on, or we could even do without a machine and just use a whiteboard or paper and keep it theoretical. Just as interesting to me either way :) I for one don't know much about how linux organises and runs itself while I'm busy reading my email and ircing and things and I'd love to find out more.
I could quote you quite a few. But I'd rather ALUG set up a series of tutorials - maybe an hour at the beginning of a meeting - dedicated to a topic to help beginners. Or perhaps at another time if you want to keep the
What do beginners need to know? I could give you a version of a talk that I am preparing to give soon for an introduction to linux to a group of highly experienced windows nt administrators but it would fly over the heads of most beginners. Give me an idea of what you want and maybe I will consider it more.
I don't think that setting up a series of tutorials way in advance and advertising them etc would necessarily work well in the Alug setting since we never know who will be able to make it to which meetings and I suspect we would often end up with someone who had gone to a lot of trouble to prepare a talk only to find that there is only one "beginner" there or maybe none at all. Sure, they could give the talk next time instead, but when you've gone to a lot of trouble preparing something and getting psyched up to do it and then find that it is almost as though no-one cared enough about your topic to show up, you don't really feel inclined to bother next time.
Adam's talk about linux administration would be very interesting to listen to even if it did go mostly over beginner's heads, there are many non-beginners in Alug who I imagine would be interested in hearing it, so that is another good idea for a meeting.
Tell me what bits of software and I will try and demo anything that I know about at a meeting.
How about different types of mail software for linux? I never even *heard* of evolution until a couple of weeks ago (now I'm using it). I know there's lots of mail-related stuff, we all use email...
Another thing I'd like to know more about is networking under linux (all the eth0, eth1 stuff).
Oh, and another nice bit of software I'd like to know more about is that Koha library stuff that I don't use but should :) MJR, if you know anything at all about it, I'd be interested in having it demo'd.
So we have on our ideas list: 1) talk/discussion on linux from start to stop (we could go *months* on that one) 2) talk on linux admin from Adam at some point 3) Mail software for linux 4) sorting out network configuration and what it all means 5) Koha demo and of course 6) Revolution OS film
Anyway having chucked a few more concrete ideas into the ether I hope that we can pick something and run with it, for the next few meetings at least, and if no-one else can come up with anything I will try to think of something for later in the year. Though I am sure I won't have to since we are so many clever and imaginative people ;)
/Kirsten