On Friday 29 October 2004 11:11 am, Alexander Henry kindly wrote:

> At first I thought we'd say, yes, you can come in for install help, but
> the helpee is the one with their hands on the mouse....  Hans disagreed,
> saying the purpose of the installfest was in fact to give the public
> installs without their involvement for free, so they can take a working
> Linux box home with them and play.  After some more bantering, all of us
> agreed to exactly this vision.  Volunteers in fact give free installs to
> people.  

For some people (visual and audial learners) it's fine to let them watch while 
we do it all for them so they can take their box home and play with their new 
Linux. For other people (kinesthetic learners), it's better to let them keep 
their hand on the mouse and guide them from over their shoulder. Kinesthetic 
learners are in the minority but we can't retain anything from watching 
someone else do it. We have to do it ourselves to get the "muscle memory" of 
the task. 

So the question becomes, are we simply installing Linux for people, or are we 
trying to teach people how to use Linux while installing it so they won't be 
hopelessly lost once they get it home?

> They must have a working Linux system of some kind by the time 
> they leave (which right now isn't happening often enough).  To reduce the
> burden on the volunteers, we need to limit the scope of the work we're
> willing to do.  We also have to prepare people with information on what to
> expect coming to the installfest.
>
> Here's how I believe everyone thinks that people coming to the
> installfests should know:  Before coming to the installfest, you need a
> working computer, complete with PSU, CPU, memory, hard drive (or key fob
> for DSL), CD ROM drive, network card, your own extra hard drive if you
> want backups.  We will install only:  The latest Fedora Core, the latest
> Mandrake, Debian testing, Mepis, DSL, Free BSD, or Slackware.  We will
> either install on a virgin hard drive, or a dual boot of your Windows or
> osX.  Then we need the times for installing their choices of stuff, so
> they know how early they need to come in.  For instance, 1 hour for a
> backup to another disk, 2 hours for a partition resize, 30 minutes for
> FC2, 3 hours for Debian, etc.  We should also have selections for the
> general packages they want installed, like OOO, Samba with printing,
> Apache, PHP, MySQL, C++, GTK dev, Java, etc.

I like these ideas. I'd like to also suggest we make up a little one-page 
handout for our "customers" to take home with them that would have a few good 
help links like linuxquestions.org and the PLUG list, and some important tips 
for when they get home. Simple, desktop-use things like never use root as a 
regular user, where to find the KDE control panel (for those who will be 
using KDE), how to find and configure the firewall, where to find /etc/fstab 
and /etc/group, etc...

I always find myself writing these things down for people and they seem to 
find it helpful. I'll just type up some stuff now and make some copies to 
bring today. If you like this idea, please give me your suggestions of what 
to include.

Siri Amrit

>
> That's the gist of it.  The same information will be formatted in a
> complete and friendly manner.  The information page would be the quickest
> to get online.  There was also talk of an appointment form, which I think
> is a great idea.  Same stuff stated above, but with check boxes,
> submission which e-mails us and gives them specific instructions on when
> to arrive.
>
> The purpose of this is to make is scalable, so the same system can cover
> both small Installfests and large Install Conferences like at ASU.  It
> would also be nice to get Installfests broadcast to big company internal
> networks, so just like Toastmaster's, everyone at Intel, Motorola,
> Honeywell will always know when installfests are held.  You can't
> broadcast stuff like this without a reliable system, and I'm hoping to
> turn this into such a system.
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