[TriLUG] My impressions from Saturday’s installfest

[Jack Hill]

Overall I think that the day went pretty well. Scott has the head-count, 
but there was a steady trickle of people throughout the day, most of whom 
I haven’t seen at a meeting. This is despite the fact that I largely 
failed at publicizing the event to the general public. I tried to 
advertise in _The Daily Tar Heel_ and _The Weekly Independent_, but the 
people people I emailed never responded that the even was 
appropriate/inappropriate for their community calendar, and I don’t think 
I ever saw it listed. There was also a street festival going on in Durham 
on Saturday, and perhaps if we had realized that this was going on we 
could have gotten traffic from that. I really had no idea how to do 
publicity; I just thought that it should be done. For the future, we 
should write down a good method of doing publicity from someone who has 
actually done it before.

The technical side of things didn’t go that well either. The big lesson of 
things not to do here is to not try to migrate your installation to bigger 
storage but copy data from the blank disk onto the good disk the day 
before the event (woops; I’m very ashamed. I got it mostly rebuilt in time 
though). However, the built-in NIC didn’t like the switch and I was 
distracted from trying out a NIC I found at Splat*Space when a user walked 
in and I started helping him. Apparently my laptop has also decided that 
it doesn’t like to burn discs anymore. I was able to use a USB drive for 
the people I helped and Scott had a cd burner, so everyone who needed 
installation media had it.

Joe came to help with openwrt installs. He did one for himself, but there 
wasn’t interest by anyone else, so he left.

When the first user showed up, I was the only other installfest person 
there, so I just talked with him and got an idea of what he was looking to 
get out of the day. When Scott and some other people showed up, we 
introduced ourselves and Scott gave a little presentation about different 
objectives of an installation, and we explored a history rat hole. I 
enjoyed this conversation but thought that some of the stuff would have 
benefited from talking about it while going though/after having done an 
installation. I think that Scott had also wanted to talk about application 
installation/configuration to be done after installation is complete, but 
we didn’t really get to this. I think a separate day where we assume 
everyone has a working installation and we swap awesome configs, set up 
postfix, mythtv, etc. would work better. Perhaps in the future we should 
plan to have a worksession day where we go over ownCloud/the FreedomBox 
application suite or some similar product.

The person I was helping didn’t have his own computer, so we did a demo 
install on my spare. We got through the gentoo install process up to 
installing a bootloader. I decided to use gentoo for teaching him about 
the basic components of a GNU/Linux system for the same reason that I use 
if for my systems. It fits with my way of thinking and explaining things. 
Perhaps in the future I should go with Arch since it is slightly more 
automated and would proceed faster. Towards the end of the day, a person 
came in with a netbook installed with a Ubuntu derived distro with the 
special purpose of being for Ruby on Rails development. He was having 
problem connecting to networks. I was disturbed to discover that there 
were no login users, only root. After adding a normal user we discovered 
there was no dhcp client. Given these facts, I was concerned that there 
were lots of other strange things waiting to be uncovered, so I 
recommended installing vanilla Ubuntu and then instilling RoR.

Jack