Get your hands dirty.
As part of the 10 Minute presentation for my BNI Chapter I will be demonstrating Ubuntu 7.04, Fiesty Fawn. I am a believer that “experience breeds confidence”, especially when it comes to forming opinions about Open Source Software. To this end the demonstration PC I am using for my presentation will be given away as prize at a later meeting. This particular PC stands out because of its apparent “ordinariness” ( which should be a word ) of its configuration.A Fujitsu Siemens Scenic T with 512MB of memory and 20GB hard drive and an onboard intel i845 video card is happily showing-off the window effects ( wobbly windows anyone ? ) accessing the network to grab updates and handling the onboard audio with nary a skip in the playback.
It is tempting to configure this machine further since it can access the Internet but I feel this would be unfair for an “out of the box” demonstration of what is on offer in Ubuntus latest release . So it comes as a relief that the Home Directory of my initial configuration comes with a series of example Video, Audio, Graphic and Documents which I can use as part of my presentation. What I hope to gain from this presentation is an on going awareness that the choice available to users , Home or Business, do not require complete hardware upgrades to benefit from interesting and “pretty” operating systems and applications. I hope the winner of this pre-installed PC will take time to experiment and examine the potential that Ubuntu Desktop offers to any user. I will be providing an additional 2 hour orientation course to help the user “get ubuntu” and blogging more about their experiences and opinions. Whilst I am no developer or bug catcher or ticket clicker I would like to use this opportunity to thank the Ubuntu team for this incredible “product”  and my appreciation for the continued quality and production value shown within. This year I am looking forward to installing more Ubuntu Desktops and keeping those Ubuntu users coming back for more.
Thanks for reading.
I just installed Feisty on a laptop that’s just an unimpressive in its specs. It’s more feature-rich and responsive than any of the better-specced machines in the house when they’re running XP. (And don’t even bother with Vista, only one machine can run it, and it’s painfully slow.)
So it should have made for a pretty impressive demo!
Glad I can finally get on-line to look at your loud mouth man! Sounds interesting showing off the ‘out of the box’ experience Ubuntu offers, something I have wanted to do for a while but no one is interested. I love the fact they have put in all of this extra graphical stuff as I read an interesting article recently about pimping up Ubuntu before you show it to people to give it the ‘wow’ factor so people will actually want to try it out. I will be interested to know how it goes.
James