[TriLUG] Promotions for Installfests

[Lisa C. Boyd]

The recent thread has been quite interesting to this newbie :)

I wanted to offer up an idea for a seminar/talk for people who have no clue 
about what Linux is or what it can do. To me there is a step of information 
gathering before someone decided to switch to Linux. I asked a lot of basic 
questions on the list about how to get started and everyone responded in a 
very friendly manner. However, most people either don't know about this 
list or don't feel comfortable asking questions. I could see a seminar 
given at each of the campuses around to just explore the basics (very 
basics) of Linux. Of course it doesn't have to be limited to campuses - it 
could be different places depending on who you are trying to reach. The 
location of talks and such will probably limit the types of people that you 
have come to them. <No offense to anyone> If you have a meeting in Roxboro 
you would get different type of people than if you have a meeting in the 
heart of Raleigh.

If you have speakers who demystify Linux and make people feel comfortable, 
then you hit them with signing up for an Installfest. It would be a great 
way to get rid of those basic questions that everyone has (like how many 
CDs do I need to bring? do I need to bring a monitor? etc) and let the 
people see a helpful, friendly TriLUG.

Possible topics:
	* what Linux is/is not/could be
	* what different distributions there are
	* differences between distributions - objective differences ;)
	* show some of the programs - Gnome, KDE, email clients,
	  web browsers common things that people as basic Windows
	  users can relate to
	* stay away from throwing out terms that may scare people off
	  like daemons, cron, apt-get, netstat, traceroute or other
	  UNIX type commands (can hit them later when they need help)
	* keep the talk simple and easy to understand - if you wanted
	  to target a Spanish-speaking community, have someone give
	  the talk in Spanish

I can help with some marketing ideas and promotional stuff for the group 
and for these Installfests. Being a newbie though I'll wait for input from 
the others that have been here longer :)

Lisa B.