[PLUG] Newbie-Oriented Talks?

[Rich Freeman <r-plug@thefreemanclan.net>]

Looking at the calendar it seems like we have a lot of gaps, at least
at North.  I was wondering if it wouldn't be a bad idea to shift gears
and toss in the occasional newbie-oriented talk?  Maybe aim at
newbie-to-intermediate.  I wouldn't mind doing a talk or two - we
should space them out with the usual advanced talks, and there is no
reason they couldn't be repeated from time to time.

Some topics I could probably quickly prepare - if others also want to
cover these no objections:

1.  Disk Storage (basics of files/permissions/filesystems, then moving
into partitioning, mdadm, lvm).
2.  X11 (servers, clients, display managers, sessions, window
managers, xauth, ssh forwarding, etc).
3.  Getting around in the shell (common commands, redirection, very
basic scripting, alternative shells, xterms, screen,
nano/vi/wget/links, etc).

Some other topics that others might want to cover:
1.  A survey of distros (the big ones, families, etc).
2.  Basic sys admin principles (for multi-user systems, servers, etc).
3.  Software development on Linux.
4.  A survey of common apps.

It seems like I see new faces fairly often, but the material is almost
always over their head unless they came for the topic.  If I gave a
talk for newbies I could probably toss a bone or two to the veterans
but to get the most out of it we'd probably want to try to get
everybody to bring a friend who is new to Linux / etc.

On the bring a friend note, we could even have talks just to introduce
Linux in general to those who have never used it.  I'm not sure
whether we'd actually draw enough of a crowd to make that worthwhile.
That sort of thing wouldn't offer much to even a relative newbie.

Rich
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