W2l-Blitz

From Hackers-IL

Guy's notes for the blitz lecture

Please note that for this lecture to be meaningful, it has to have some logical structure, that will help people remember what happened, afterwards (after the hangover of the day after ;) ). For that, we need to supply a clear and focused message. The key is, stability, choice and freedom. as an added benefit - the educational benefit of Linux. I think even these 4 things are too much for a 'focused' lecture, but it can be done, by splitting the blitz demonstration into 4 parts, 10-15 minutes each.

In the first, we'll emphasize stability - it'll be more with talking (hard to demonstrate that a system is table over a 10 minutes duration). We could get an application stuck and show how we can recover from it. could even freeze the entire graphical system and show that it can be fixed via a text console or via the network.

Then comes choice. For this, we'll need to show that for each software, we have several alternatives. Here is an E-mail client (show e.g. Mozilla's mail client). Here is another (kmail). And another (Evolution). And for the old-fasioned (pine or mutt). Do the same with the web browser, desktop environment (GNOME/KDE), etc.

Then comes freedom - this will be a short talk (unlike the full meeting dedicated for it in the 'novice' track) about what Open Source is, and what Free Software is, and why should grandma care about it.

And finally, a quick glance under the hood - to see that the hood can be easily uncovered. this part is trickier - as showing the real power will probably be too far a leap for people to make (i.e. all configuration is in text files, you can see the actual process tree and control each process completely, you can read the source; tools like strace and lsof, etc.). I could use some simpler ideas, if anyone has.