The Boston Red Hat March Meetup

Guys,

This meetup, I'll be sharing my experience downloading and installing Fedora Core 8. I've never done this before, and so it's going to be an interesting experience.

My ultimate goal is to get an Open Source desktop running for myself (experimenting) and for my kids.

For myself, I'd like to be knowledgeable about the newest (linux) desktop software out there. See if it competes with OSX, for example. Check out all the latest apps.

For the kids, I was hoping to teach them early using lynx as an alternative to entry point to the Internet, by providing an open source and non-graphical start on the web. Let's face it, every parent's dream is to have their kids diligently studying wikipedia, compiling open source apps, and researching nasa.com on the Internet, right? What really happens is that most kids waste their time on facebook and video games - never breaking through the commercial "barrier" of plug-and-play simplicity. My generation had the benefit of "starting from scratch" on the Internet. They never will (it will be handed to them). Also, since I could customize the desktop, theoretically I could make it more kid-friendly for them. No promises there, but we'll see.

I started downloading at 9AM this morning. My firefox process is running at 400Meg's, but I'm 40% there. Hopefully I'll get it to DVD before it crashes. I'll let you know how it goes at the Meetup. If there are any suggestions (.e.g on how to get me started, let me know).

Beers at a hip Venue (probably Diva) will follow the 1/2 hour presentation.

Charlie