[TriLUG] My impressions from Saturday?s installfest

Tue Jun 5 07:17:49 EDT 2012

Hi Jack,

No need to beat yourself over the head - you did plenty by being there and 
helping folks out.  A "steady trickle" can be a good thing - I've been to 
events where a flood of people makes for long waits and the accompanying 
frustration.  Were I a bit closer to town, I'd be more able to help out 
events like this!  Thanks for stepping up to the plate!

Tom

-----Original Message----- 
From: Jack Hill
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2012 1:24 PM
To: trilug at trilug.org
Subject: [TriLUG] My impressions from Saturday’s installfest

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

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