It's been a tempestual two weeks for me. Just a taste of what I'm facing
personally: Depending on how I count, about three or five times in my
life I have succeeded at being not only being the best that I can be at
something, but better than a greater majority of people at that thing,
then getting punished very severely for it. On the horizon this month an
opportunity awaits which may actually reward me for doing excellent work,
which of course I'm trying to acquire. So sorry if I'm running a bit
behind on installfest stuff.
A number of people on this list have spoken in-person or by e-mail
off-list about improvements to the installfest. First, I've called
Charles about the wired network. He's going to set up a public jack and
leave a hub in the usual classroom for us to use. So we'll actually have
network this time.
Dennis remarked about the ASU installfest which I also attended, and
problems they had. There seems to be a severe miscommunication to the
public about what installfests are about. Some come in at 4pm with no
CD's expecting a repartition, backup, and dual boot to be completed.
Others wanted some extremely crazy setups which taxed the best of us. We
need to communicate the purpose of the installfest better. We're going to
have a web page with the Installfest HOWTO in it. Question is what.
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. We would also have a
Toastmasters format, where we'd have tasks instead of speeches,
functionaries, and toolkits which volunteers would bring. 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. 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.
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.
--
--Alexander
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