[AuckLUG] Looking for people to give talks at AuckLUG

[Darryl Ovens]

On 25 Jul 2007, Joel van Velden <joel at tpnz.co.nz>  wrote:

>At a recent AuckLUG meeting it was proposed that I should ask the mailing
>lists for some ideas of what topics people would be interested to hear
>spoken about at our meetings. Ideas?
>
>Conveniently, I am also looking for people to give talks at future months'
>meetings. Please get in touch with me off-list if you could possibly help
>with this.
>
>Cheers,
>Joel van Velden
>
As it happens all the other posts (24th July) sounded like they would be 
of interest to me.
Being a complete newby to Linux I am keen to use it as much as possible, 
but unfortunatly I am and will be encumbered for some time yet, with an 
OS starting with m.  This due mostly to existing items of software that 
I cannot replace or find alternatives to.  These being specialist 
mechanical engineering related (Vibration monitoring, balancing etc) to 
my profession and the fact that Several years back I splashed out on a 
colour laser printer, which now turns out to be windows dependent and no 
amount of searching (by me and many others by the sound of it) has 
turned up Linux drivers for it.

So even though I often reboot in linux to try something out or "have a 
play" I soon find I have to revert to "M" to print it or run something.
The idea of being able to have both OS running at once, (while perhaps 
asking for trouble), would seem to be a solution  especially for newbys 
like me, while we get the hang of things and find the Linux alternatives.

Notice I said that the other posts on virtual hosts "sounded" like they 
would be of interest.  Unfortunatly they all assume significant 
knowledge of Linux and it's ways.  For instance a phrase like

". . . you can use easyvmx to create empty images / virtual machine . . ."


goes right over my head, I guess easyvmx is a program?  and I can guess 
that an empty image is an image with nothing in it, and from context I 
guess that it is an image of a virtual machine.  But to actually make 
this work I'll bet there is a lot more to it than that.

So it strikes me that you could easily fill an evening on this topic of 
virtual machines (and or alternatives) especially if aimed at newbys.  
Trick then will be to find the newbys and get them to turn up, (however 
we may be surprised at how many "latent" newbys there are).

Then it struck me that this maybe a useful way to encourage (or perhaps 
in many cases; enable, as this is all that is holding me back) people to 
change to Linux. What would be needed, is a download able "CD" or 
similar, that has the required programs and files etc on it to "install" 
a virtual machine within  "M" or Linux  to run the other OS. 
Or are there any alternative ideas that will allow windows hardware 
drivers and awkward windows software to be run from Linux and how to use 
these, allowing newbys to start using linux.

Cheers
Darryl Ovens