Apologies to anyone in Ubuntu-UK who may have seen this all already.
Earlier in the year I created a sample screencast that I sent to the (old) list. It was a quick one to see if people would be
interested in such things. Since then I've been playing with the various technologies available for screencasting and have
come up with a system that works for me. It is quite complicated and I have [0] blogged about it already. There are of course
other ways to create training videos.
I finally managed to set aside some time to create some of these (it's not a quick process) and uploaded them to Google video
and archive.org. I've made the videos available in multiple formats (MPEG2/MP2, OGG/Theora/Vorbis, MP4 and audio only OGG and
MP3) to make them as accessible as possible. You'll note that I have made the videos available under a creative commons
licence and have uploaded them to a publicly accessible archive which makes them easy to redistribute. They're far from
perfect, and as this is only the beginning I am hoping to learn as I go, refining the process and the content.
The reason I am making these is to make it easier for people to see what Linux looks like, how it works and how it's not as
hard as they might think, before they actually commit to installing it. It's also for those people who have committed but need
some help in the early days. It's not really aimed at power users or experts. I don't for example expect many people on this
list to learn much from the real beginner ones.
I put them on a domain I already had for this called Quickones.org. The idea being that the videos are "quick ones" :) i.e.
short videos, not great long rambling affairs. The few I have created are just my first stab, I'd like to create some more,
and have made a list of some on my wiki [2]. As I get time to make them I will, but I'd like to see if there are requests
before I do that.
There are some topics that I think might be useful for the Linux newbie like "Running Windows programs on Linux" (using
WINE/QEMU/DOSEMU/whatever) and "Where to go for help" but as I am not a newbie I am really just guessing what the newbies
need. Whilst I originally created these for Ubuntu (because that's what I use) there's no reasone that demos can't be made
for other distros.
Can anyone who has exposure to newbies please help me by telling me what they get asked most often? What things do you think
newbies want to see demoed? What would you like to see shown? Any other suggestions are welcome.
Thanks,
Al.
[0]
http://popey.com/Creating_Screencasts
[1]
http://quickones.org/
[2]
http://popey.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?VideoDemos
