[brlug-newbies] September 17th Linux SIG Workshop

[EdsLinuxBox]

Greetings all, 

The next meeting of the CCCC Linux Desktop Special Interest Group will be on 
Monday, September 17th at 6 PM in the Computer Lab. We will be sharing a lot 
of good news with the SIG. The short story: Joe Zachary and I attended the 
club board meeting last evening. Following the board meeting, we met with Art 
Nichols, Russ Williams, Mark Lappin and Robin Voigt, and we have the "go 
ahead" to immediately set up the Linux Lab in what is now Lecture Room #2. We 
will share the details with you Monday evening and discuss/develop the plan 
forward. Needless to say, we are VERY excited. This step opens up a world of 
opportunities for the club in general, and the Linux SIG in particular. Some 
of the items that we need to discuss are: 

Furniture/equipment arrangement of the lab

Workday to physically set up the lab - Wanna learn about building a network? 
This day will be for you.

What peripherals do we need and want to have installed, now and in the future, 
in the lab, i.e., printers, scanners, speakers, DVD burners, memory card 
readers, a stereo turntable (anyone remember those) to convert vinyl to CD, 
VCR to convert tape to DVD, etc.?

Workday to install the operating systems - Wanna learn about hardware and how 
to install the OS and software? This day is for you. 

What Linux distributions do you want to have installed on the machines?

Xandros?
PCLinuxOS?
SimplyMepis?
Kilkit?
Kubuntu?
Sabayon?

Do we want to configure some machines for specific missions like: video, 
audio, games, graphics, home office/small office, internet, etc.?

Lab Administration - Joe, Will and I can't do this by ourselves.

Lab use procedures

Lab use by other than the SIG. The lab will be a multi-use facility and, when 
not being used by the SIG, will be available for use for other club 
functions. 

Path forward for the SIG.

We now effectively have "carte blanche" to move the SIG forward as rapidly and 
aggressively as we want, in that we can have as many workshops as we want, on 
any and all subjects that we want, at essentially any time that we want. 
Initial calculations indicate that we can potentially put as many as 20 to 25 
permanent stations in the lab, with room for an additional 6 to 8 laptop 
users at each workshop. Overall, club growth has been in a decline for the 
last several years but growth of the Linux Desktop SIG, and interest in Linux 
on the desktop, has grown significantly and consistently over the last 3 
years, as was demonstrated by the attendance at the Linux Day Open House and 
membership in the SIG. The two significant areas of potential growth for the 
club are Windows Vista and Linux on the Desktop. So how do we make this 
happen? 

Exposure!

I have been asked to be a permanent member of the CCCC Radio Show team and 
will be on the show the second Saturday of each month. SIG members need to 
listen and call in with Linux questions, if for no reason other than to raise 
the level of Linux awareness to the listening audience and to give the host a 
segue to allow us to talk about Linux. Who would like to join me on the show 
to talk about Linux? Randy Ridge is experimenting with having 4 people on 
rather than 3. 

Linux Day Open House - This was such a great idea! Thanks to Larry Braud for 
coming up with this and putting it all together. If memory servers me 
correctly, we had more people come through on Linux Day and signed more new 
club members than the last two general membership open houses, and that was 
with little to no advertising except for mention in the newsletter and on the 
radio show, and with essentially no expense to the club. 

More workshops and on more subjects - I am working with Mark Lappin, Randy 
Ridge and Russ Williams on developing the software titles that will be 
included in the upcoming Cajun Clickers Windows Shareware/Freeware CD. Most 
of the titles that will be included (OpenOffice, Blender, InkScape, Scribus, 
Gimp, GimpShop, NVU, Tux Paint, Firefox, Thunderbird, Audacity, Notepad2, 
VirtualBox, Picasa, Google Earth, GnuCash, and MoneyDance, to name a few) are 
programs/packages that have been developed by the GNU/Linux community and run 
on Windows, Linux and, to a great extent, Mac, and, for the most part, work 
identically on all platforms. We need to develop a cadre of workshop 
facilitators (I dislike the terms instructor and lecturer) to assist the 
entire club membership, not just the SIG, in using these applications, which 
are Linux mainstays, most of which are installed by default when you do a 
Linux installation. Beyond the functions of finding and saving files on a 
Linux system, as opposed to a Windows or Mac system, it really matters not 
what OS platform is used to conduct the workshops. Who will volunteer to 
become a facilitator? This can not continue to be a "one man band". The 
calendar is now wide open. Pick your application(s) and time slot(s). 
Tutorial DVD's - I have found a number of video tutorials that I think we can 
author to DVD and make available to the membership for a nominal fee. This 
could be a fund raiser for the SIG/Club. 

Partner with the local computer stores to provide free workshops, except for 
club membership, to their customers that want to learn to use Linux and/or 
the above mentioned programs. What about approaching the local dealers about 
offering a discounted club membership with the purchase of a new computer? I 
am not proposing that the club discount the membership but rather that the 
dealer pay part of the $45 as a part of the computer purchase and the 
customer pay the rest. 

What about doing some advanced Linux topic workshops like using the command 
line (putting on flame retardant clothing), the Linux file system, setting up 
and administering servers (file, web, media, etc.), programming, web site 
development, building Debian and RPM packages, networking, Linux System 
Administration? 

After we get through all of this, and if we still have time, I will 
demonstrate a program that I have been using called 'DeVeDe" (DVD) which, as 
the name indicates, is a DVD authoring program that allows one to very easily 
create a DVD or CD, playable on both your DVD player and your computer, from 
source files of almost any video format. It is a really slick program. I will 
demonstrate how I created a tutorial DVD for the program Blender. We may also 
take a look at Kilkit Linux, which is another desktop distribution that I 
have been playing with. 

See everyone Monday evening, 

Ed