Free Software lecture at Highcliffe Computer Club
A few weeks ago, Peter Young from the Highcliffe Computer Club posted a message on the Dorset Linux User Group mailing list asking if anyone would be able to give a lecture in the afternoon about Free Software. I volunteered, and visited last week to check out the Club and sit in on a discussion meeting about “Broadband Versus Dialup”. I came away really impressed by the club, they have a really nice community there, and that’s what Free Software is all about!
So today I had the pleasure of presenting a two hour lecture to the Highcliffe Computer Club on Free Software.
I spoke about software freedom, why it matters, why its good for business, great for schools, the history of the GNU Project, and demonstrated the most popular Free Software applications such as Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and Inkscape.
It was well received, and I really enjoyed doing it, but I’m aware of a few things I’ll try to improve next time that will all come with practice, I’m sure.
- Recording. I need to purchase a good digital video camera, like Ian has.
- Talking more slowly and deliberately. What can I say, I talk fast :-)
- Speaking up. I was asked to speak up at the start, and I tried to remember to project my voice across the whole hall, and didn’t get asked again, but need to keep this in mind.
- Oratory flourish. I managed to put a few things in, but often I’d explain something without really making the point with the rhetorical flourish I could do.
- Slides. I didn’t prepare any slideware because I felt a purely live demonstration of the system, with spontaneous questions, would suit the style of the Club best. However, slides in big type with URLs to refer to would have been a great idea.
- Fielding questions. I feel I spent too long answering individual questions - given I only covered half the material I had prepared - I never covered Free Culture and the Wikimedia Projects. I guess that’s another lecture in itself, though…
Although, for not covering all of the material, that wasn’t just my blabber-mouth ;-) For the second part of the lecture the chairman Ken Fluck had set up a desktop machine and asked me to demonstrate installing Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper from the Live CD he provided. This was totally improvised, and a great challenge to do it off the cuff, but very fun. I explained how a Live CD works, and then partitioning. During this the xscreensaver came on (I’d turned my laptop’s off) and that was really well received, which I’d never have guessed - next time I’ll leave my screensaver on :-)
It seems many people in the audience had already tried one mainstream distrubution or another, but all had problems with the installation procedure - not just partitioning, things like kernel-APIC problems halting the LiveCD boot process and so on.
There were some great questions from the club too, such as how to still run old much-loved proprietary software, how viruses and security compares with Windows, how to get copies of free software without broadband, how to transfer files between two Windows and GNU/Linux computers, and so on.
Next time, rather than bringing my laptop with the deprecated non-free Ubuntu installation, I’ll bring an old desktop computer with several GNU/Linux distributions and show all of them, and the basic installation process - maybe with Instlux - and then move on to the basic applications. I might even demonstrate the applications in Windows, as that’s most likely to persuade people to check them out and start on the road to “100% Free Software”.
And it sounds like there will be a ‘next time’ - I’ll hopefully speak again here, and at another local, larger, Computer Club next year. It was total fun, so I really look forward to it!
The Free Software lecture at Highcliffe Computer Club by David Crossland, except the quotations and unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
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10 Responses to “Free Software lecture at Highcliffe Computer Club”
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What an excellent lecture - especially as it was on a subject that 95% of us had never heard of. I would not worry about not completing the material that you had planned. Leave ‘um wanting more. I would have welcomed your views on Wikipedia etc. Maybe next time.
Yes, in all future lectures I’ll keep in mind the need to provide a list of further reading. Thanks for the encouragement - I hope there is a next time :-)
Enjoyed the talk. Perhaps you could take questions after each section of the talk for say five minutes. I’m interested in knowing about the office DB engine, I used to use DB2 on a CP/m system years ago. Regards John k
David
I feel that I can’t thank you enough for the excellent presentation you gave us at the Computer Club last Wednesday. It was much enjoyed and appreciated by all the members there. Nice change for us to have someone that really knew the subject. Sorry that I broke your flow but I was concerned that some of the people needed the basics to be able to use the Ubuntu CDs that I have distributed. Hope you will be able to come back and continue the rest of your talk in the new year.
Ken Fluck — Chairman
G’Day David, Thanks for your fascinating self analysis and commendations. I guess you recognise your main problem and are too modest to mention it! namely that our level of expertise is way below yours and that procedures simple to you are mountains to climb for most of us. I’ve looked through the Official Book of Ubuntu and I dread the thought of using things like foo@bar:~$ to get working the very many things that need to be done. You may have materialised as our Wizard but where are the wizards in Ubuntu? At least you now know how Columbus felt when he first met the indigenous natives in America. Looking forward to your next exploration.
Hi John!
The database ‘component’ of OpenOffice.org is called Base and includes its own database engine that stores files as XML. XML is a very interesting technology born from SGML that’s used for data interchance, which became a very important topic with the Internet. The official OpenOffice.org User Guide offers a “Getting Started with Base” PDF download under a free culture license, and there is of course an OpenOffice section of Wikibooks, one of Wikipedia’s sister projects - however, this needs a Base section to be written - perhaps you could make a start? :-)
Hi Ken!
Thanks for your kind words, it was really a pleasure to give my first lecture on Free Software to a real computer community and I’m glad it was enjoyable. The second half where I demonstrated installing Ubuntu on your machine was and improvised and so spur of the moment that breaking the flow was actually great fun :-)
Yes, a demonstration of how to install a GNU+Linux system and then a demonstration of popular Free Software applications would be a good structure for next time - I’m sure we can arrange a date next year for such a session :-)
Fedora 6 already includes an ‘accelerated desktop’ as standard, and by March or April this will be normal for all GNU+Linux distributions. So there’ll be some real showmanship :-) You can see videos of Novell’s XGL accelerated desktop on their website.
Hi Tom!
Yes, a command line interface can be scary at first, and it is not neccessary to know about to use a GNU+Linux system.
But it has a certain beauty to it. The inherent freedom of Free Software means that you can look inside any part of a GNU+Linux system and see how it works. You don’t need to be a programmer to do this - I’m certainly not! - and a command line interface lends itself to seeing how things work.
And its fun once you get going! :-) I really recommend learning about it, as there is a lot of friendly ‘tips and tricks’ style information out there on the web that you shouldn’t underestimate :-)
For example, the CommandLine.org.uk blog often writes about neat things a command line allows you to do, like “Making use of Bash History.”
After reading about the talk you gave to the Highcliffe club we at the Ringwood & District Coomputer club would be interested in you giving a talk of a similar nature but concentrating on Linux and its application. Our meetings are held on the third Tuesday of a month between 2pm and 5pm. Please contact me on the Email address supplied. We have a provisional program published on our Web site which could be manipulated to accommodate a talk if required
Graham Ledbrook chairman R&DCC
Hi Graham!
I’d love to do it any time that your schedule can fit me in :-)
I’ve checked the provisional program on your website and see there is a talk listed on the 20th of March on Free Software. Is this for another speaker?
If so, I would be happy to come along then to support the other speaker, if they’d like to do a ‘panel’ type session. I also see the talk on the 15th of May about reinstalling Windows XP, and on the 19th of June about Adobe Photoshop, which I could also join in on.
Finally I can speak about webdesign and websearching if you are short of topics towards the end of the year :-)
Look forward to hearing from you soon!