Hoosier Educational Computer Coordinators' Conference, Day 1

Day 1 of the HECC Conference found me helping Mike Huffman and Forrest Gaston run their workshop where they had people install OpenSUSE 10.1 from a 5 CD set and showed off some of the programs that are available. Jeff Henderson, the principal at my high school, was there, though he had expected more emphasis on application usage where there really was a heavy emphasis on installation stuff.

Nothing incredibly exciting, just some basics for people who needed them.

I found that I could figure my way around OpenSUSE pretty well, but I disliked the way everything was set up by default. The icons on the desktop look cluttery, it's all single-clicking which means people (myself included, the first time) end up opening twice as many instances of everything, apparently if you let your mouse hover over an icon it runs, things like that; not irreparable, but annoying. I don't know whether that's KDE in general or just OpenSUSE, but blech!

I wore my Ubuntu shirt to the conference, and gave away the rest of my CDs and a bunch of brochures. I was a little wary about having lunch courtesy of Microsoft, though, in that attire. ;-) Microsoft is also sponsoring some big casino event with prizes and gifts and all kinds of stuff for the HECC attendees tonight...no thanks...

Mike Huffman showed optimism that the Microsoft-Novell deal will be useful to the community. I expressed my skepticism, but he seems convinced. I hope he's right; Novell has done a lot of good for us in the past, it's certainly possible.

Overall it was an interesting day...AND I got a shiny new toy out of the deal!

Round two tomorrow!