[Lancaster] Software Freedom Day

[Ken Hough]

Kristof Van Laerhoven wrote:
> Hi Ken, all,
> 
>  From previous experience with installfests, I think we shouldn't turn 
> away people that prefer dual-boot installations (which is usually the 
> majority, but we can try to persuade them once they show up). Key to 
> getting enough people to show up with their laptops/PCs is to advertise 
> it as much as possible - we can do posters locally here at the uni, and 
> perhaps a few places in town?

I went the dual boot route to begin with. I still have a three dual 
booting setups and they still work well, but I soon discovered how badly 
wrong things can go when needing to do the inevitable re-installation of 
MS Windows. I now understand how to avoid most of these problems, but 
this entails not using the typical default dual boot setup.

I no longer bother with dual booting. Unless I'm doing something for 
other people, I'm 100% Linux.

The fact that Linux is not presently guaranteed safe for writing to NTFS 
partitions (ie MS Windows XP) also concerns me.

Contrary to what is commonly accepted and on the basis of hard 
experience, I do not believe that dual booting for the non technical and 
unsupported newbie is to be recommended. Problems will be seen as being 
caused by Linux and not the by the real culprit.

If we do provide for dual booting, then the possible (likely?) problems 
should be made very clear. Perhaps we should include a written 
description/disclaimer.

On a different tack --  What kind of installation(s) should we provide? 
I'm thinking here of someone who might turn up with a P166 containing 
only 64MB of RAM. I can vouch for the fact that KDE/Open Office is a 
waste of time on such a PC. Yes, it will run, but you might as well go 
and have your dinner while it's loading or doing anything serious. I 
know this, because I used to have such a machine. Using 'icewm' instead 
of KDE helps, but it's still not exciting.

Looking back, the above comments could seem rather negative. That's not 
intended, but disapointment is likely to reflect badly on Linux. We need 
to get our act sorted. Comments gentlemen (and ladies?), please.

> 
> I think our own computing building would be great as a place to hold 
> this.. it has all the infrastructure, and Martyn suggested we could even 
> ask the cafe to open up for the occasion.

Sounds good!

Ken Hough

> 
> Handing out Knoppix is a great idea, and hopefully the Ubuntu CDs have 
> arrived by September ;)
> 
> best,
>    Kristof.
> 
> Ken Hough wrote:
> 
>> Martyn Welch wrote:
>>
>>> Hi all,
>>>
>>> Is this something we should be very interested in? :-)
>>>
>>> http://www.softwarefreedomday.org/
>>>
>>> Martyn
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes! I would like to help if possible.
>>
>> From what you were saying last PM, I assume that this is likely to be 
>> at the Uni. and could take the form of an 'install fest'. I could be 
>> available from mid morning to late afternoon.
>>
>> What should the programme be? What distros/software are to be offered 
>> and how? I guess that in most cases CD/DVD installation will be used, 
>> so  we would need to provide enough CDs/DVDs to cover, bearing in mind 
>> that on low/medium spec PCs, installation takes some time. Could also 
>> do network installs. Have done this several times using SuSE -- just 
>> need a set of boot floppies to start things off.
>>
>> Maybe we should also reckon on providing things like 'Open Office' and 
>> other stuff for people who are not yet brave enough to dump MS 
>> Windows. We could help these guys on their way by handing out copies 
>> of 'Knoppix'.
>>
>> One more point: Are we going to get involved with dual booting?
>>
>> The usual default options can introduce a lot of problems when the 
>> inevitable re-installation of MS Windows is done. Also, I understand 
>> that there can be problems with NTFS partitions (ie Windows XP).
>>
>> Ken Hough
>>
> 
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