As part of the 10 Minute presentation for my BNI Chapter  I will be demonstrating Ubuntu 7.04, Fiesty Fawn. I am a believer that “experience breeds confidence”,  especially when it comes to forming opinions about Open Source Software. To this end the demonstration PC I am using for my presentation will be given away as prize at a later meeting. This particular PC  stands out because of its apparent “ordinariness” ( which should be a word )  of its configuration.A Fujitsu Siemens Scenic T with 512MB of memory and 20GB hard drive and an onboard intel i845 video card is happily showing-off the window effects ( wobbly windows anyone ? ) accessing the network to grab updates and handling the onboard audio with nary a skip in the playback.

It is tempting to configure this machine further since it can access the Internet but I feel this would be unfair  for an “out of the box” demonstration of what  is on offer in Ubuntus latest release .  So it comes as a relief that the Home Directory of my initial configuration comes with a series of example Video, Audio, Graphic and Documents which I can use as part of my presentation. What I hope to gain from this presentation is an on going awareness that the choice available to users , Home or Business, do not require complete hardware upgrades  to benefit from interesting and “pretty” operating systems and applications. I hope the winner of this pre-installed PC will take time to experiment and examine the potential that Ubuntu Desktop offers to any user.  I will be providing an additional 2 hour orientation course to help the user “get ubuntu” and blogging more about their experiences and opinions.  Whilst I am no developer or bug catcher or ticket clicker I would like to use this opportunity to thank the Ubuntu team for this incredible “product”   and my appreciation for the continued quality and production value shown within. This year I am looking forward  to installing more Ubuntu Desktops and keeping those Ubuntu users coming back for more.

Thanks for reading.