[SATLUG] May 10 LOCC Computer Show ideas...

[John Choate]

On Tuesday 11 March 2008 14:20:01 ed wrote:
> At this past LOCC computer show, Nathan and Don batted around the idea
> of demonstrating graphics manipulation under Linux for the May 10 show.
> I think that's a great suggestion.  Ideas bounced from demonstrating
> GIMP all the way though showing how Linux handles Google Earth.  All the
> ideas fronted have great potential.
>
> However, nobody (including me) suggested showing how Linux handles
> digital camera photos -- a personal hobby of mine.  I didn't even think
> of it until I got home from the event.
>
> I'd be willing to contribute that subject, if y'all think it would
> help.  Nothing would be more instant to the crowds than taking a photo
> of a visitor, loading it into a Linux computer, cropping, detailing, and
> printing out a professional quality picture or portrait.  Whaddya think?
>
> Cheers!
> Ed/the0wl

I would be interested in participating in that. We could show them GIMP, 
Digikam and other photo manipulation and organization software. That's what I 
often tinker with.
It would also be neat to show that Linux can be used for gaming too. Not only 
the open source titles available, but running commercial games as well. Also 
games which were originally only for MS platform but have had their code 
released to open source and have been built on Linux. Showing that such 
titles can not only run on linux, but on a laptop with shared video RAM to 
boot (pun intended).
Demonstrating WINE would be a good idea too. Perhaps somebody has Crossover 
installed and could demonstrate Windows business apps running. I could 
demonstrate some commercial games running with WINE which were never released 
for Linux.
Multimedia apps could be demonstrated also. My friends would always get 
curious when they saw me running Amarok, retrieving song lyrics, album covers  
and other metadata while listening to albums.

If we have a small network running and put a Windows machine on it, we could 
also demonstrate a Terminal Server Client as well as Smb4k or other Samba 
networking utility. I semi-often use these at work. It's fun to open a 
spreadsheet from a Windows machine and use OpenOffice to edit it in Linux and 
save it directly back to the Windows machine.
For the astro-geeks, there is also KStars and Stellarium... both of which have 
capabilities for guiding telescopes. Not that we should set up a telescope, 
but we could show that the features are there, as well as for 
astrophotography done directly from free software.

So many possibilities.