[Nottingham] Installfest Proposal

[.waffle]

Duncan John Fyfe <djf@star.le.ac.uk> wrote:
| As said at the meeting, I should be able to bring along some server
| boxes,
| a wired and possibly a wireless hub for doing network installs but I
| imagine most machines brought along won't have a network card.

You won't need a network card... If anyone has a wireless USB card, you're
sorted. All that you need to do then is specify the appropriate driver to
load on bootup. Debian, Gentoo and Redhat support it, and they're pretty
much opposite ends of the market, so I presume all distros allow you to
specify 3rd party drivers on install. In fact, we could even make a floppy
boot disk that auto sets up the network and starts a remote install... If
the person doesn't have a bootable CD drive (I've seen quite a few CD-RW's
that do this). Ideas?

| Could we get someone like John Winters ala linuxemporium (or Suse
| ...) to come along and sell disk sets or even supply them on a sale
| or return basis ?

Even better idea... Funds for the club! Download a few of the latest
distros, and have a cd burner on stand by to get copying the cd's. Charge £1
a cd and you're sorted! I'm sure this won't be frowned upon... It's not as
though we're making profit that is going to be taken away from Linux
users...

| I should also mention that we were going on the principal that anyone
| who is into
| Linux already has it and the install fest should be geared towards
| newcomers.
| Hence we would offer a distro like Mandrake or Suse rather than
| Gentoo or Debian.

Well, that seems sensible, but I'd like to see Debian support there too... I
do love Debian with a passion :)

Anyway, any help you need, I'm more than willing to help out in any way - I
also have some gear that could be of use as well - such as a machine I use
as a file server that has SuSE 8.1 and Redhat 9 ISO's just lying on the hard
disk, in case anyone wants a network install... Plus a couple of hubs and a
switch. Oh, and one of these smart USB -> IDE things for Mass Storage
support. Dead useful if anyone has USB 2 as it's 480Mbit (or 12Mbit at USB
1).

.waffle