[Wylug-discuss] November Meeting and Future Talks

[Dave Fisher]

Hi All,

I've had precisely zero offers in response to my last appeal for November
speakers.

In the hope that it might spark a sudden outbreak of volunteering, I've
attached a list of the topics that people have asked to hear talks on since
July this year.

If you think that you could give even a very short introductory talk on any of
these topics for November, please let me know immediately.

If you think you could produce something eventually, but need a bit more time,
let me know now so that we can plan a sensible schedule for later.

If I don't get any volunteers by the beginning of next week, I think I'll have
to try a variation of Jim's tactic in these circumstances, i.e. I suggest we
meet up at the Stoner Building, do an 'ask the audience' session until the
sensible questions are exhausted then shoot off down to the pub to get some
liquid inspiration.

I do have a couple of arm-twisted offers to talk about mutt and pine respectively.  

It would be really good if we could turn this into a comparative session on
email clients with 10 minutes each on Evolution, Thunderbird, Pine, Mutt,
Squirrelmail, OpenWebMail, etc.  Any takers?

Dave


Suggested Talk Topics
=====================

I hope to set up some kind of categorising and 'voting' procedure to let us
prioritise these topics in future, but this list is currently in no specific
order (although it's roughly in chronological order of asking).

* What do you do with Linux?

* Sound

* Digital photography

* DVD/CD Writing

* Backups

* Maintaining preferences

* Where is 'x' file or application?

* Local resources, skills and products

* Hal

* Device management: udev, devfs, etc

* Removable drives, especially usb

* Samba

* Philosophy and politics

* Virtual machines and emulation

* Newbie Don'ts ... classic mistakes to avoid

* Newbie "disasters" and recovery from them

* Open source equivalents or substitutes for Windows applications

* Running applications automatically at start up, init, runlevels and desktop configs

* Hidden or 'advanced' desktop preferences

* Presentations with OpenOffice? Impress

* Gimp: common photo processing tasks

* Apache: 10 things you can do with

* Mailing etiquette, including threading

* Comparative initial setups on laptops

* How the (FSB) filesystem is organised and why

* Basic dynamic website development with PHP and MySQL? (Roger Beaumont see: http://list.wylug.org.uk/pipermail/wylug-discuss/2005-September/005562.html and 005563.html)

* Comparative office suites: OpenOffice?, gnome office, KOffice

* Vector graphics: sodipodi, inkscape, xara, xfig, dia

* AJAX: Basic intro to creating rich web GUIs with it

* TeX? and LaTeX?

* Basic PosgreSQL?: as an application backend

* Comparative Linux Distributions: experienced users on their 'rise and demise'

* Comparative Email Clients: Terminal-based (mutt, pine), Desktop (Evolution, Thunderbird, Kmail), Web (squirelmail, openwebmail, etc)

* Linux friendly web hosting

* Introductory GTK+ programming

* Object-Oriented C

* Troff (e.g. tbl, ms, man); writing documents, manual pages, tables

* Using the bash shell

* Debian package creation

* C and GNU/Linux? systems programming

* Autotools (autoconf/automake/libtool)

* M4 (the macro language)

* Localisation of packages with gettext

* Fonts: sources, types (screen, print), installing/configuring them (for terminals, X, applications, printers, etc)

* IP video cameras

* Logging: syslog, apache, other apps)

* VOIP and Asterisk

* Printer setup, especially network access

* Comparative approaches to 'hot-desking'

* Document management (electronic filing?)