[TriLUG] Promotions for Installfests

[Lisa C. Boyd]

>I can do the last part. I'm quite good in my SSL (Spanish as Second Language)

If you were willing to give the talk in Spanish, I'm sure we'd break into 
the Hispanic community. I wish I could speak Spanish so I could communicate 
effectively with people who don't speak English well. Then again, I have a 
gazillion things I'm trying to learn myself - Linux being at the top of the 
list!

>Being a newbie you can provide "the insider look" of what are newbie's
>interests around Trilug, what do they fear the most, what do they think Linux
>is...

I'd be happy to help :) One of the biggest fears I had was that everything 
would have to be done by command line - UNIX flashbacks - you know? I think 
giving a demo of what you can do with Linux and just some of the options 
(don't want to overload people!) can speak for itself. When I thought of 
Linux in the past, I thought of geeky nerds stuck in a basement programming 
and hacking into people's computers 24-7 (no offense to anyone here - ok?). 
It was definitely nice to meet some of you at the Installfest and see that 
you can still use Linux and have a life :) I know that may sound weird ... 
but those are just my "newbie" impressions. To meet "normal" people that 
are like me using Linux is an encouragement.

Linux is always touted as a server and something that a person who is more 
technical in nature would have to run. Enlightening people that it can be a 
powerful "regular user" tool is something I believe this group could do 
very easily.

Travis had some good suggestions too about allowing people to ask questions 
about basic how-to stuff. I don't know that it would be necessary to have 
two different machines side by side because then you'd have to decide what 
you were going to put there - Windows? Mac (older OS)? I think one of the 
biggest fears for someone switching over would probably be - would all the 
work I've done to date be totally wasted? would I have to redo all my 
documents? That's the biggest thing to overcome. Once you could show them 
they can open their Word documents in this program and have more 
flexibility - then you'll start to win them over with the "free" talk :)

BTW, I was playing around yesterday with Kmail and the fact that I could 
view messages in a thread just blew me away :) It's the little stuff in 
life - LOL! I read a lot of list mail and it was really cool that I could 
do this. Still playing around with stuff though!!

Lisa B.