17 November 2006 - Intro to Linux

Topics

Intro to GNU/Linux (by Abdul (QoD) Dakkak and Jason Bechtel)

Attendance

>20

Presentation Resources

Meeting Announcement (txt)

Intro to Linux Slide Presentation (html) (odp) (pdf)

Meeting Notes

We reserved NI 2075 (computer lab) and booted all the computers to live cd's of Ubuntu 6.06. About 10-15 minutes late, we had all the computers up and running with Ubuntu 6.06. There were over 20 people in attendance, and quite a few new faces.

Jason started off by giving the Intro to Linux presentation (see link above). After covering the history we discussed the reasons to use Linux, including stability, security, and freedom (no DRM, sony root-kits). This lead into a brief discussion of the open source development model, and how it is based on continuous improvement from contributions from a variety of individuals.

The example given of open source development in action was Mozilla Firefox, as compared to Internet Explorer. At least one person had been using Firefox because they thought it was better, without even realizing it was open source.

Next we covered several distibutions, including Ubuntu and Fedora. One member gave a demonstration of package management and 3D desktops on his fedora laptop.

We finished with in introduction to the command line. I think in the future we might want to have this be an "optional" session at the end, because a few of the new attendees had blank looks on their faces. At the end we raffled off the Ubuntu Unleashed 6.06 book from O'Reilly.

From talking with several people after the meeting, it was interesting to note that we had several "non-computer" people at our meeting, who were just interested to see what Linux was. They left with live cd's of Ubuntu 6.06, so we'll hope for the best. I think this might be the beginning of a change to Linux as the average users desktop computing OS.