On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > On Wed, 13 Nov 2002, Elton Woo wrote: > > > Is there or will there be a Canadian Red Hat Road Tour? > > If so, where may one find details on it? > > you know, before everyone gets their knickers in a knot > over this RH tour, it might be worth pointing out that > you can learn darn near everything you need on these > very red hat mailing lists. unless someone who's actually > *been* to one of those things can fill us in on what > we're missing. I went to one last night (los angeles) and I think that Robert is correct, in fact if you hang out on these lists you may be a little disappointed with the tour if you're expecting to get amazingly detailed info. I learnt three main things: 1. The GNOME-Start menu duplicate entries for mouse/keyboard configuration in SystemSettings and Preferences have confused lots of people and this layout will be changed. 2. Quite a few people are unhappy with the fact that the minimal-recommended memory usage for a graphical workstation is 192Mb. Someone (Dan Kegel?) pointed out that the rhn "throbber" in the panel uses 12Mb! 3. Don't go expecting to get a t-shirt (my main reason for attending!). Of an audience of approximately 45 there were three t-shirts. The guy handing them out explained that their normal procedure is to give them to the people that ask the most questions. Lots of disappointed people wandered off not quite consoled with the key-chain and demo-copy of Psyche (3 cdroms, contains no devel-libs). It was an interesting evening and the RH guys are very professional and will answer whatever questions the audience comes up with. But by far the best part was that LALUG had organized a "round table" which included the 3 RH guys, a sysadmin manager from Kenwood, a sysadmin from USC, a sysadmin from a digital effects company and an excellent moderator ( I think it was was Dan Kegel http://www.kegel.com/linux/edu/). The discussion which followed a demonstration of the "desktopness" of RH8.0 revealed that the barriers to deployment of Linux in business are frequently to do with end-user recalcitrance in switching to a new environment: they don't care about computers, they've learnt a bunch of tricks the hard way with the current OS and apps, why should they change? It was pointed out that it's not just low-end users that have this inertia. On the positive side the costs of licensing are making Linux much more appealing especially compared to WinXP. One weakness in Red Hat that was touched upon was the lack of intermediate-priced support options, one being left currently with an all-or-nothing situation. Suggestions were made that a comparable model to Microsoft's might work. All in all, it was interesting, but technically less so than this list, and the efficiency of discussion was lower. (Also I was really disappointed not to get a t-shirt!) Oisin Feeley -- Psyche-list mailing list Psyche-list@redhat.com https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/psyche-list
