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One Laptop Per Child, Two Laptops per LUG 2008 February 2

On Friday night, I went to the Cherry Hill Linux Users Group monthly meeting. The main reason I went was because David Bicking was presenting his thoughts on OLPC. Also on the agenda was a presentation by Dave Harding on The Gimp. Although I have my own OLPC, I wanted to hear someone else’s thoughts on it, and even more so, wanted to try the application sharing feature. Once we shared a document, it was really neat to see how you could really work together with it. I’m sure there are ways to do this with other GNU/Linux distros (and probably OS/X or Windows) but it is so easy with the OLPC’s SUGAR interface. I really liked how it worked. I personally find the OLPC quite usable, but Dave Bicking wasn’t as impressed with its usability, but we both agreed, or at least I think we did, it was a nice piece of equipment for the target audience and showed a lot of promise.

Dave Harding’s talked about The GIMP was very well done. Maybe we can get him to do it at LUG/IP sometime!. Dave started off with a good introduction to his topic by talking about the idea of photos expressing in one image what would take many, many words to explain. He started off with talking about the ideas of layers, and the use of the opacity feature. One of the neat hints Dave gave was talking about paste people’s faces over another was to line up the eyes.

After that, he discussed Fuzzy Select (Dave calls it Magic Select). It find patterns in images. This is helpful if you want to erase things in the background.

He also showed off filters. I liked the embossing filter he showed. There are many different filters to try. I must admit I never really played with them, but Dave showed some neat thing that can be done with them. He also showed Script-Fu options. Script-Fu appears to be similar to filters, but works slightly different. Like filters, there are some neat possibilities.

After the meeting we went and had some pizza and talked more about Free and Open Source software. All-in-all, a enjoyable evening.