[Nottingham] Installfest Proposal

[Duncan John Fyfe]

On Thu, 10 Apr 2003, Martin wrote:

> Duncan John Fyfe wrote:

>
> Or burn them via Linux at the time. An interested bod will be willing to
> wait the few mins or so for the burn whilst discussing the fine points
> of Linux.
>

<back_of_envelope>

If (distro == SuSe) burning own CD's = bad idea (YaST not GPL)

Given Mandrake download (v9.1 is a 7 CD set or 3 for a minimal install)

<old codger>
Ah, I remember the days when you could get a full distro on a handfull of
floppies...
</old codger>

assuming a 15xCDRW gives a minimum of 4 minutes/CD

1xMandrake @7CDs = 28 minutes
giving 16 CD sets per CD burner over an 8 hour day and one well used CD burner.

hmmm, still not convinced about this.

</back_of_envelope>

>
>
> > I think Debian 'au natural' is a bit rough for a newcomer.  Knoppix on the other hand may be a possibility, especially as a 'look before you jump'.
> >
> > Any Knoppix users able and willing to comment ?
>
>
> My interest was rekindled with "DemoLinux" that boots/runs from CD...


Ditto Knoppix.  I've heared Knoppix has good automatic hardware detection.
I've got the Knoppix 3.2 image to try but that's another 'roundtooit'.

I know nothing about "DemoLinux", please enlighten me.

As well as giving a 'try before you buy' option, knowing what hardware you're up against
before you start is a good thing (TM).

Installationalist: So Installee, what graphics card do you have in here ?
Installee: I like the pretty lights
Installationalist: And what frequencies can your monitor handle ?
Installee: it does what ?
Installationalist: And the internal modem, a winmodem perchance ?
Installee: eh ?

>
>
> > More random thoughts -
> >
> > backups and hdd partitioning.
> > I guess we should think about backing up people's data
> > before we trash it ;)
>
>
> Very good point!
>
> Have them read and sign a (SHORT) disclaimer in case their hard drive
> physically dies from accessing parts of the disk never before accessed.
>
>

Disclaimer a v. good idea.
CDs were mentioned for backup.  I don't know many people who have less than
one CD's worth of data to back up, especially with todays hard drives.
It also depends on them having a CDRW on the machine (or a USB one being available).

This is the opposite of the install problem - how to get large amounts of data off
their machine.

Assuming we cannot open machines to plug in something usefull like a SCSI card
the options that spring to mind are:
via network, USB device, modem (?) , CDRW, DVD-RW (?)

We could print the bytes from their disk as hex to paper and give them a tool to type it back in again. At 132x60 colsXrows we could get 4560 bytes per side meaning only ~2.2E+5 sides per GB of hard disk.

> > Demo machines - machines running software for people to try.
>

I guess OpenOffice (Opening MSOffice docs in OpenOffice), Gimp , TuxRacer, FlightGear and some 'junior' packages for children.
ha ha, now the difficult one.... Gnome or KDE ?

>
> Yep, both old and new. (I've got an old 8088 that would be good to
> resurrect - small challenge there... (;-))
>

I don't suppose you can run Wine on an 8088.

>
> > Does anyone have contacts in other LUGs who have run install days ?
> > Their experience(s) would be valuable.
>
>
> Sheffield have a recentish fest on their web site.
>
Ta.


Have fun,
Duncan

-- 
Duncan John Fyfe          X-ray Astronomy Group,
                          Dept. of Physics & Astronomy,
Phone +44 116 252 3635    University of Leicester,
E-mail djf@star.le.ac.uk  University Road,
                          Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.