General Debian Talk

This page intends to help people who were asked to hold a general talk about Debian on a random conference. These are thoughts from Joey that may not need to match your conference or the talk you ought to give. Though, it's intended to help.

What kind of audience to expect?

That does absolutely depend on the audience of these expos. The most critical audience is when you don't have a dedicated room for the talk but some open edge (often called "forum") within an exhibition and people wander around, stop by and walk away during your talk. That's not only confusing for the speaker but also for the audience and requires the speaker to hold an interesting talk that fascinates the audience (otherwise they will walk away).

On a Linux Exhibitions you will normally have both, experienced users as well as newbies. However, most of the people listening to a talk entitled "Debian ..." without a technical appendix will probably be non-experienced users or yet-to-become Linux users, I'd guess.

This could be different in eastern europe since I don't have any experience about how many people use Linux/Unix there or use Computers at all, use the Internet, be organzied in user groups etc. Though, I guess that large parts of the audience will have no or only few experiences with Linux and Debian.

If you are experienced enough to vary the focus of your talk you could ask at the beginning of the talk "Raise your hands if you have installed a Linux box already" and "Raise your hands if you already played with a Debian system". This will give you a rough idea about the knowledge of the audience and you could leave out large chunks of general information and include more technical stuff for example.

Possible structure of a talk

1. Overview

   Structure of the talk, let people know what they have to expect

2. Linux Intro

   (to be shortened if people already know)

   • History (Founded by who, Started because, Where)
   • Development Process
   • Kernel Management
   • Diversity: Kernel != Distro
   • Some Dates and Facts (Linux 0.99, 1.0, 2.0, 2.2, 2.4, size of the Kernel, supported arch's, number of developers, year etc. a rough guess is sufficient, people have to smell the idea :)
3. Distributions
   • What is a distro?
   • What was the 1st one and when did it came out?
   • What has happened since them?
   • >200 Distros? Why? All have a different scope.
4. Debian
   • Why another distro? Reasons for founding the Debian Project
   • Prominent position of Debian (free distro, open project, no company, organisational structure [i.e. flat],> 500 developers, aout 10 architectures, more than 4000 binary packages [to be counted]
5. Freedom
   • DFSG, explain it item by item
   • DFSG is the major reason for many developers to join Debian
   • Many Debian developers are also upstream authors
6. Highlights of Debian

   This is technical

   • Who makes Debian? IT experts from every edge of the world
   • Free Software Developers
   • Free Software Advocates
   • Menu system
   • Detailed package dependencyships
   • Many architectures from one source, being released at the same time
   • ftp-master implementation -> pools -> auto-compilers
   • Upgrades on-the-fly
   • High level of Security (even if security team should fail to release advisories)
7. Organizational Structure

   i.e. how does it work

   • All members are: developers
   • No hierarchy, though one leader
   • Teams for special tasks (listmaster, debian-admin, ftpmaster, keyring, webmaster, security, policy, voting etc., development groups (python, toolchain, ...))

Some issues with regards to Debian could be taken from the Advantages HOWTO.