[NTLUG:Discuss] Open Source

[Alvin Goats]

I'be been really busy and hadn't had time to read everything here.

The DFWUUG has an outreach program going with the Native American Indian 
community to teach computing skills and teach math and science as they 
requested.

We're working on building a classroom at the Dallas Indian Methodist 
Church, installing KUbuntu and teaching them from opensource software. 
Price is right for the poor, security is better and overall, everything 
is aimed as a win-win. We have some members who ran into barriers with 
"X years experience", which by volunteering, gets around this barrier.

The best way to promote linux is to help people learn it in a simple and 
easily recognizable way. I picked kde as it has a look and feel very 
much like M$ windows as used at work and school. This keeps some 
confusion down as everyone heads for the lower left corner of their 
screen and find popup the shows categories of software to use. This 
reduces culture shock and aids in the conversion process.

As this ;project unfolds, we will be using OpenOffice, Fiefox, Sunbird, 
Thunderbird and other FOSS software.

If you really want to promote linux, go do something more useful  and 
let your job know how it's going. As they see it being used in other 
areas that aren't run by computer geeks, they'll get to see more 
positive use inside  their companies. You might consider simple things 
in the Windows world to start leveraging with, things like pdfcreator to 
make uneditable pdf files, OpenOffice to "convert file formats" that 
MS-Office won't do, things like that. Or using Thunderbird to recover 
ALL of your e-mail that Outlook just lost (don't try to fix outlook, 
just load thunderbird and let it convert the outlook files to it's own).

Adoption is slow, but if it's done gently, you'll get more positive results.

Alvin