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...just the mental images.. the embarrassment... oh god

Hey Mark Lappin. That has to be you. The only young dork on the page of your little computer club Cajun Computer Club. Too bad Katrina didn't wipe your ass away. BTW are you fucking Faye? nm you're probably a virgin.

Just make them aware of the learning curve and sell them on the real benefits.

That's funny, because I've never seen you say the first positive thing about free software. It's nice of you to think of me again, but really I wish you would go away instead of FUDing people about learning curves and other bullshit shortcomings of free software. Either way, I'll use you to the advantage of free software, so you might as well be nice. Every time you link to my page people get a chance to visit my class, which is full of good advice for newbies. The inordinate time you waste fucking with me is just more evidence of how scared M$ is running. How much time does M$ spend on Twitter alone?

Most of the time all they do is do simple spreadsheets and documents. Tell them about OpenOffice. Tell them about other stuff like Amarok or whatever. And (if you're recommending Ubuntu, like you should) explain to them how Synaptic works. I've had people look at me funny when I tell them about all the software in there, as if it couldn't possibly be true.

Well, that's not a bad start - find out what they want and tell them there are programs that do it. In a short talk, I would not get bogged down in the details of any package manager. What counts is that they exist and are easy to use and often easier than staring at boxes in CompUSA. Ubuntu is not a bad distribution, but Mepis, Xandros or kbuntu have a more Windoze friendly package selection and interface.

Don't overdo it though... claiming that Linux is "inherently superior" to Windows and blabbing about how "evil" Microsoft is will do more harm than good the moment they have to deal with a problem that doesn't exist in Windows,

People do need to hear that GNU/Linux is better than M$ because it's free and what it means to be free. Quality issues can only carry a user so far, they ultimately need assurance they are not wasting their time on something that's not going to be any different in the long run. The root cause of M$ problems is not technological, it's M$'s anti-social business methods. That in turn is the root cause of most "Linux problems."

Of course, there is too much of a good thing, just as there is too much of a bad thing. Because you can't really migrate someone in five minutes, I've been teaching people how to do it right for two years now, as you can see from the linked page above which comes complete with slide shows anyone can use for their own purposes. It takes about six contact hours to get a user up and running. Those hours should be spread out over a period of months, but always be available to answer questions. After that they don't look back.

ROFLMAO! Are you serious? WTF? What the hell is the difference if clickers.org and lists.clickers.org are hosted in two different cities or two different countries? Do you not understand the concept of pointing out that 'twitter' here can blabber about "M$" 24/7 and then happily make use of a domain that is run from a Windows (or "Windoze" as he calls it) box? Hell, you know what? Here's a page on clickers.org that points back to the other domain, and even has twitter's real name (or so I understand) on it. There, happy? You really should work on your reading comprehension.

This is the way we are pushing free software at the Cajun Clickers Computer Club, one of the oldest and largest computer clubs around. As much as I favor 100% free systems, the easiest way to move people is through distributions like Xandros, Mepis and others that include non free "add-ons" that give the user those few things free does not: Flash, and accelerated video. I also highly recommend Parallels to those other nasty little things that are left. It's working too. People who use a combination of free and non free come to understand that their pain comes from non free. I can see 15% Linux Desktop penetration this year, followed by the 30% tipping point in 2009. The media content will follow that tipping point because it always courts the audience wherever it can. Free Software has not gone away and it is the future because of it.

The biggest draw right now is that Linux is the easiest way for them to move into the future. Thanks to the porting and popularity of Firefox, Open Office, Gimp and other applications to Windoze, Linux is now the easiest way for the majority of users to keep using these best of class applications. 32 bit versions are good enough for users that just don't want to be forced to spend $2000 on new hardware. The security and stability of free software is very important - current Windoze users are fed up with all of the absurd crap they have to do to keep Windoze working. Commercial Linux gives them what they want right now and does so with much less trouble than an XP install.

Microsoft has done a lot to undermine themselves through DRM and that combined with the usual upgrade is going to wreck them. Vista does not provide the path to media because DRM screws it up. Serious A/V people are going to continue to buy set top boxes to get their media for much less cost and effort than it takes to do things through M$. A $30 DVD player will feed your big screen TV and audio system just as well as an Xbox does right now. Now combine that with Nothing in Vista and Office 2007 being familiar. I watched someone try to save a Word Doc as .doc instead of .docx on a new computer last week. Smoke poured out of her ears as she pushed her usual shortcuts and looked in vain at the remaining menu items. Sooner or later I asked her what the flashing light was and there she found a save as item. She had given up already. I have to wonder if the light would have flashed at all for a patient person like myself who does not know the goofy keyboard shortcut. Open Office is much easier than that and KDE has all the bling Vista does without the pain. Free software has a very good desktop for a very dissatisfied user base. Power users already know this and are looking at Linux as an escape. The other users will follow if we can move those user now. Things have never been easier.

I'm done with my wife, my neighbors and my four year old girl. I also help teach a class for newbies, which has plenty of Aunt Betty and I'm familiar with all the bogus issues and FUD. I can assure you that the new environment is more comfortable for them and soon becomes more familiar.

Most distros' idea of migration is a non-destructive partition sizer and Grub. Once you can boot both, you're on your own. ... I can't figure out how to work MythTV, the remote control's dead, I can't find my documents, I have to re-enter all of my e-mail settings and I can't find the cheat sheet from the ISP, and that pretty Thomas Kincade screensaver is gone. Oh, and how do I get to the iTunes store?

Well, well, well, you seem to have done some research but I can easily refute most of the above and routinely help newbies get through the troubles that Bill Gates created. MythTV is an advanced topic and not really something most computer users are interested in. Where Windoze hides user documents is a real pain, but there are lots of good GUI tools to find them, much like you would use under Windoze itself if you wanted to really know. Xandros does a particularly good job of helping the Windoze refugee and provides links in a windows familiar desktop environment. Email and contact information are easy to migrate, despite Bill's best efforts to lock them up. ISP information is something the user has to enter whenever they move to a new computer or have to wipe and reload their broken Windoze PC. The same can be said for screensavers and every other customization done to Windoze, but can not be said of GNU/Linux, which is much easier to move from machine to machine. On the media front, I'll direct you to a record store, Magnatune, the internet archive's concert collection, and other sources of non DRM'd material. All of the things you mention are flaws that GNU/Linux does not share with Windoze and more reason to migrate sooner rather than later. Free utilities are superior in every case.

But ya got Bill Gates real good, didn't ya?

I'm not out to get Bill Gates, I'm out to keep him from screwing other people. When it's all done, he can sit around with his ill gotten $40,000,000,000. So long as he quits suing public schools, and trying to lock up computing, I'm happy. There's no chair throwing here.

I'm done with my wife, my neighbors and my four year old girl. I also help teach a class for newbies, which has plenty of Aunt Betty and I'm familiar with all the bogus issues and FUD. I can assure you that the new environment is more comfortable for them and soon becomes more familiar.

Most distros' idea of migration is a non-destructive partition sizer and Grub. Once you can boot both, you're on your own. ... I can't figure out how to work MythTV, the remote control's dead, I can't find my documents, I have to re-enter all of my e-mail settings and I can't find the cheat sheet from the ISP, and that pretty Thomas Kincade screensaver is gone. Oh, and how do I get to the iTunes store?

Well, well, well, you seem to have done some research but I can easily refute most of the above and routinely help newbies get through the troubles that Bill Gates created. MythTV is an advanced topic and not really something most computer users are interested in. Where Windoze hides user documents is a real pain, but there are lots of good GUI tools to find them, much like you would use under Windoze itself if you wanted to really know. Xandros does a particularly good job of helping the Windoze refugee and provides links in a windows familiar desktop environment. Email and contact information are easy to migrate, despite Bill's best efforts to lock them up. ISP information is something the user has to enter whenever they move to a new computer or have to wipe and reload their broken Windoze PC. The same can be said for screensavers and every other customization done to Windoze, but can not be said of GNU/Linux, which is much easier to move from machine to machine. On the media front, I'll direct you to a record store, Magnatune, the internet archive's concert collection, and other sources of non DRM'd material. All of the things you mention are flaws that GNU/Linux does not share with Windoze and more reason to migrate sooner rather than later. Free utilities are superior in every case.

But ya got Bill Gates real good, didn't ya?

I'm not out to get Bill Gates, I'm out to keep him from screwing other people. When it's all done, he can sit around with his ill gotten $40,000,000,000. So long as he quits suing public schools, and trying to lock up computing, I'm happy. There's no chair throwing here.

We shall continue to disseminate these pearls of wisdom ... No matter how many fake email address, no matter how many open proxies - we shall prevail!

The goal is to make the lists look as described, unfriendly and rude. They do this with their own rude posts and heckling.

They also aim at self censorship. By calling people rude all day long, they hope to keep people from unfavorably describing their crap. Describing Windoze as second rate is not rude, it's an overwhelming statement of fact and it's easy to present in a way that does not insult the user.

These efforts are co-ordinated and they have been from the very beginning. Microsoft knows the power of word of mouth and seeks to influence it:

http://web.archive.org/web/20050313031916/http:/ /www.kickassgear.com/Articles/Microsoft.htm

Bullshit floated on those lists is usually echoed by shills in the Wintel press. Their "ambassador" program at universities is another extension of this program. Given their technical inferiority to most competition, hype, deception and insults are all M$ has to work with. They are losing traction.

It does not work on the local lists, of course, because free software is all about sharing and they still don't have enough resources. Rude people are ignored, technical questions are still answered and newbies are directed to anwsers. The LUG has two newbie efforts, it's own list and volunteers at the local computer club where classes are offered once a month. Those classes are filled and growing.

The end result for Microsoft is a loser in any case because lying does not work. Everytime they get caught doing it, they undermine their reputation further. This is why they have one of the worst reputations in world. Everyone knows they are a bunch of dishonest bullies with second and third rate software.

Oh well, then your classes must be very enlightening. Until your "students" get home and try to do something with the application you just "taught" them how to use.

That's why me and the other two teachers provide step by step slides. Even an AC bartender who runs a hate site can get things done that way. See for yourself. Sorry, Ackbar, that we don't have any instructions to help you migrate from your mighty leet G5. F the haters, baby.

It's supposed to work with ssh. If that's true, you should be able to drag and drop your files from any computer using Konqueror.

I've done similar with a Zaurus running OpenZaurus. Using GPE, you can even run stuff via X forwarding, which is kind of fun, but silly if you are really intersted in a laptop replacement that fits into your pocket.

Yes, having a CF and MMC/SD slot on the Zaurus was nice. I put in a 512MB SD and used the CF for wifi. The SD worked as a /usr and extra home space. This device has the wifi built in and you will be able to do the same thing with the compact SD as you can with an SD.

The world of Linux handhelds has been sweet for a while now, but things are getting much nicer all the time. It does not take much to run Debian as this wacko from my LUG demonstrates. If a 150 MHz P1 with 70MB of RAM can do it, handheld devices are not far off. 128 MB of RAM should be more than enough, if only they had a 4Gig hard drive on it for OS storage, you could run a full distro. Such machines are on the way and they will be running Debian or some other version of free software.

It's time for you to have egg on your face, admit it, and take it like an adult. And then the next thing you need to do is stop wasting your time and fix the problem.

What egg? Gnumeric and Kword run circles around both OO and M$ Office. As a free software fan, I have my choice of applications. Unlike 20 years ago, that's not the case on Microsoft platforms. The primary reason to run OO is to open Microsoft's horrid and bloated file formats with an editor that has good html and pdf export. When I want to write a paper or manipulate data the free software world has more choices that work better than Bill Gate's best wet dream. The problem is solved because it never existed.

I call bullshit on ZDNet. That Wintel rag never gets free software stories right and often gets them wrong deliberately. It's not worth reading and I could care less what gets published there. OO may be big and bloated next to other software but Microsoft is the prize hog and always will be.

In this case, it goes against personal experience. I can and do run OO on systems with resources Microsoft's latest, the now five year old XP, won't even install on. When I need a slide show, I pop open OO presenter on ... a Pentium 2 with less than 256MB of RAM. Try that with M$ crap-ola. Sure, you might be able to create an 80MB monster piece with software that Microsoft has abandon support for. Good luck getting it off that machine on a network, ha ha. Will your new copy of Office render it correctly?

An extreme example of fat new software on skinny old hardware was posted onto my LUG recently. Check out OO running on a 133MHz Pentium laptop with 70MB of RAM:

Holy Shit! That's crazy. But far from 200MB for OO alone, the combined six or seven big applications took 120MB of swap. The nutcase ran OO, Abiword, Kword, Kontact, Konqueror, GIMP and other software at the same time on separate virtual desktops. XP would be a fragging, blue screened disaster if someone tried to run M$ Office, Outlook, Photoshop and IE all at the same time, say nothing of trying to load up a few other extras.

When someone does that with XP or Vista and M$ Office, I'll believe that they are no less bloated than OO and Linux. Right now, I believe, XP won't install on less than a P3.

More importantly, the kinds of applications that people "need" to run do work. Office, Outlook, IE and in house software will work. As in house software is 90% of what businesses pay people to write, you can say better than 90% of important winblows software will work. That's better than XP and Vista will give you. From a business perspective, Xandros has what you want. Only terminally closed junk like Autodesk and games will really give you trouble and those problems are overcome as mentioned above.

How do I know? These people told me, with step by step how-to instructions for Xandros migration, which included great Crossover Office, Win4lin, Wine and Dosbox instructions. Xandros makes it easy to migrate without losing email, contacts and other stuff that Microsoft makes to transfer even to other Microsoft machines. The support network Microsoft has traditionally relied on (that's you and me) is moving to Linux.

Part of that is advocy. That involves teaching and listening. There are plenty of people here with a clue.

I've been teaching a newbies class for the last four or five months. I've worked in large and small companies and have some idea of what people want and what software can reasonably offer them.

Set up multiple OS for demonstration. This is the hardest thing for a newbie to do, so it's the best service to offer. Windows 101? Sure, teach it on KDE and give them a reasonable notion of why there's a log on, what it protects them from and what it gives them. Games, OK, windoze wins there for now. For everything else, free software is easier to use and maintain. "Sheilding" newbies from the "complexity" of different OS and desktop environments does them a disservice. They quickly master basic concepts of files and GUI. Giving them more makes them happier and lets them make up their own mind down the road.

Visit the, admittedly windoze heavy, Cajun Clickers Computer Club for an idea of what a community, all volunteer computer club teaches and people want to know.