Below is the presentation I gave. In total, it’s about 1 hour 40 minutes long, including many questions and demonstrations of Google Wave. I hope to slice it up and put it on YouTube eventually, maybe even later this week. However, to get the basic idea, you only need to watch the first 20 minutes. And the next 10 minutes show a great example.

• Download my Google Wave presentation for BUG in Windows Media Video (WMV) format (87.7 MB).

Links of interest:

• The “What is Google Wave” video used in the presentation.
• The Google Wave Developer Preview from 2009 Google I/O that I stole some slides from.  (Ironically, it’s only 1 hour 20 minutes long, but is far more technical.)

Email is like traditional mail (snail mail). Each email message is in its own package (envelope). Emails are not linked together into a conversation but rather are read and sent one at a time. Some modern email programs and some email websites like Gmail try to link all the messages together so you can see an entire conversation, but in actuality each email message is still completely separate and this is just an attempt to work around the problem. With traditional email, a conversation with multiple people can have everyone sending their responses at different times in response to different messages so it can get messy. You can reply to a message that has already been settled because you haven’t read the emails sent after the one you are currently replying to. As a result, long conversations between several people can become very confusing.

“Wave” changes the structure of the email process. A Wave is more like a discussion. Everyone’s responses are tied together so you can see and read through the entire conversation before replying. You are less likely to miss anything and your responses keep up to the current conversation. Also, in a Wave you can reply to any part of a conversation.

Imagine this. I send an email to you saying “Hey, why don’t we meet at the waterfront at 3 tomorrow morning?” Realizing my mistake, I would have to send another email after saying, “oops, I meant 8!” In the mean time sometime could respond with; “What? 3am?” This is not the case with a Wave. You can edit your Waves after you send them, but be warned, the edit history is saved. If you sent all your co-workers a Wave one night calling your boss a moron, you can go back and edit it, but people can still look at the whole conversation, including the changes. You can also un-send a Wave, however. If you realize you “misspoke” you can remove all the recipients from the message. If you do this before they’ve checked their Waves, no one will know that you called your boss a moron, which really isn’t conducive to steady employment.

Because a Wave shows the conversation as a whole rather than in separate emails, there is no longer a need to quote the old email message underneath your response, often in reverse order, which is difficult to follow.

Wave is like Facebook messages. You can see all the messages in one place, unlike email or text messaging where you can only see the most recent messages grouped together. What’s really cool is that it also has sub-threads. If one conversation becomes two conversations they can go in separate directions without interfering with each other. So one part of the wave will be talking about what movie to watch, but another part will be talking about which day to watch the movie, rather than it all being jumbled together.

You can even add a voting gadget (tool) that allows everyone to vote on which movie they want to see or a map gadget to show the address of a restaurant or an RSVP gadget everyone can indicate if they want to come or not.

You can add and remove people that are in the conversation whenever you like. With Facebook you are stuck with the people added at the start and you are stuck with only those people.

As well as conversations, you can also play games with other people in a Wave. For example, you can insert a Suduko, Chess or Checkers in a Wave and play together.

You can also drag and drop a file into a Wave so the participants can download it.

Wave is a bold re-imagining of what email should be. Google hopes that Wave will completely remove email from the internet. Wave could change the way we communicate or it could become just another failed product. Time will tell, but it will be an interesting time.

If you missed the recent BUG presentation of the history of Linux, you can listen to the hour-long presentation on the link provided on the BUG website. Email your questions to me at shawn@semanticcomputing.ca and I will try to get answers.

Choosing a Linux Distribution

A distribution is a collection of programs included with Linux. For example, some Linux distributions come with Firefox browser, others with Konqueror.

The easiest to use most feature complete Linux distribution, the one I recommend to new visitors who enter the land of Linux, is Mint Linux. Trust me, it is minty fresh. Mint Linux comes in several flavours. The ‘main’ flavour, or edition, is the GNOME edition (pronounced GUH-nome). There are others, like the KDE distribution. It’s a matter of preference, really.

For those that have old hardware and want a stripped down version of Linux, you can download the Linux Mint XFCE Edition. Although it’s user friendly, the interface does not feel like a modern interface: it’s not as feature complete, but that’s the whole point. It does the bare minimum, to keep the operating system (Linux) out of the way to give more room for the programs.

No matter what distribution or edition you choose, you can run the same programs on it. But for a new user who doesn’t care about the choice just yet, I recommend the plain old regular Linux Mint.

Available Software

You can use open source software on Windows. Some software is the same in Linux as Windows, and if you use it now in Windows you can lessen the shock when you switch to Linux. Here are some examples of Linux-compatible software that you can use in Windows:
Internet Explorer can be replaced with Firefox,
Microsoft Office can be replaced by openoffice.org,
Adobe Photoshop can be replaced by The GIMP (and Illustrator by Inkscape),
Microsoft Outlook can be replaced by Thunderbird to read your email.

Installing

Linux is an entire operating system. In general, computers don’t usually have more than one operating system on them. For this reason, many operating systems don’t play well with each other. Linux, of course, is different. You can install Linux on ‘part’ of your computer and Windows on the other part. Windows will make it so you can no longer access the Linux part but Linux plays nicely with Windows.

You must decide if you want your computer to be able to boot both Linux and Windows or only Linux. If you want to run only Linux then this job is very easy. Just select ‘use entire hard disk’ guided option. It will set up everything just for you.

To install Linux along side with Windows you need to resize (partition) your Windows C-drive. A hard disk can be divided into several ‘virtual drives’ or ‘partitions’. Each partition can be used for something different. The Linux install program can do this for you, automatically. As long as you have the required free space on the drive, it can partition your C drive and make an empty partition for Linux.

However, the good folks at Linux Mint and Ubuntu have added something new, the WUBI install method. If you pop the CD in your disc drive it can start the install program in Windows! It can install inside your Windows C partition. This recently developed technology is included in new Linux distributions. With this you can install Linux without having to repartition your hard disk or make any substantial changes to your computer. There is, however, a drawback. Your Linux system will run slower using the Windows file system.

Once you have made up your mind as to which you want, you can go ahead and install Linux. Download the ISO file from the Linux Mint website and burn it to a DVD as a disc image, not as a plain old file. The installation of Linux is really simple. Linux takes care of all the configurations and drivers for you.

Successful installing!

The Presentation

• Audio + Visual online: Or, you can watch the Linux history presentation in your browser, with the slides synced with the audio.
• Audio:
  • Linux History OGG file or
  • Linux History MP3 file.
• Visual:
  • Linux History slides PDF file,
  • Linux History slides OpenOffice.org Impress file, or
  • Linux History slides PowerPoint file.

The Links

Here are important items I mentioned in the presentation, or diagrams I referenced:

• Linux Mint is the easiest, most completely Linux user experience. You can buy Linux Mint and have a CD sent to you for about $20 or download it for free from their website and burn in to your own CD.
• Linux Mint is built on the power of Ubuntu which is another fine distribution. You can get a CD of Ubuntu shipped to you for free from the Ubuntu website or download the CD image for free from their website and burn it to your own CD.
• Xubuntu, a cut down Linux designed to run as fast as possible on old computer with all applications you need. You can get a CD shipped to you for free from the website or download Xubuntu to burn on your own CD.
• Wikipedia’s Unix page has the Unix time-line chart that shows the relationship between Unix types and their relationships. I forgot to mention that OS X comes from NextStep, a Unix system.
• Linux Distribution Time-line is the chart that shows all the different Linux distributions and how they relate to each other. This page lets you see the revisions the chart has gone through, but you only need to download the newest version in the list at the bottom.
• Finally, here are two great resources on Linux that I read about 4 years ago, from which I just may have stolen many of my points from. I went back to find these pages just for this presentation. The first is A Brief History of Unix and the second is The Complete History of Tux (So Far).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License.