[Nottingham] Awareness Day Part 1

[Martin]

Martin wrote:
> Martin wrote:
>> Robert Postill wrote:
>>
>>> Dear All,
>>> Well, it's that time of year  and the Awareness Day is upon us again. 
>>> Today, at Green's Mill in Sneinton we will be having an organisationally
>>> focused day.  Come over and discuss your organisational issues with us
>>> and maybe we can help you get Linux onto your network.
[...]
>>
>> I've updated our website for the Awareness days.
>>
>> For EVERYONE onlist:
>>
>> Please check out
>> http://www.nottingham.lug.org.uk/
>> http://www.nottingham.lug.org.uk/AwarenessDays.Nov2004/
> 
> 
> NB: The ".rtf" versions of the posters require their associated penguin 
> images to be downloaded also!
> 
>> and enthuse to whomever might be even only slightly interested.
[...]



In summary for Day 1: A good fun day even if a little quiet at times. 
(More prior advertising required...)


There was the amazing feat of seeing a few geeks hiding in suits. Almost 
unrecognisable! We even had some suits types call in.

A varied mix of hardware was wired up and demonstrated. The only 
argument was on who was to provide dhcp and then whether samba slugged 
it out with whatever else was found on the lan!

We had various Debians and Mandrakes running on Suns, PCs and laptops, 
and we had wireless access. We also had an impressive mess of cables for 
such a compact setup.

Mandrake 10.1 installed in less than 30mins including 2GB or so of apps. 
Fantastic! Except that I installed it over the wrong partition (:-(( 
(Thankfully, I do have a backup from last night, phew. (:-))

Voice-Over-IP (VoIP) was demonstrated. I still don't know how it routed 
through whilst I didn't have Shorewall or any routes configured!!!

Mr Tux-Games was soon burnt out and excused after an all-nighter.

A most beautiful femme saved the afternoon with sandwiches, crisps and 
cake (:->)

We had an extended visit from a post office 'official' who later became 
fascinated with our lan partying...

We were very nearly filmed for Irish TV!

We even had a mini-install fest on a very hybrid PC... "X -config" saved 
the afternoon (damned no-good ATI proprietaryness linux 
incompatibility). Also, a new DVD reader in the box speeded things up 
tremendously over an old x2 CD-ROM that was first tried...


We got some very useful feedback from a newbie and a newbie-ish. Also a 
few reminders of what the old hacks can still learn and sharing of other 
stuff just 'taken for granted'. "What? You can do /that/?! How?"

This is a good excuse to arrange an ad-hoc install-fest and problems 
solving practical session soon. Bring along whatever hardware.

Also, I think some introductory 'newbies' sessions are long overdue.

What do others think? Open-Source style feedback required!


We then finished off with a bit of a lan party with a few ferocious 
games of Unreal Tournament. There are some very good sets and weapons in 
UT backed up by good graphics and sound to show off our multitude of 
computing kit. Duncan showed himself to be a lay-in-wait sniper 
extraordinare. Seeing Duncan later shot off a platform into endless 
drifting oblivion through space was most satisfying. I showed my gaming 
ineptitude by shooting myself in the face 4 times! The dumb AI robots 
won. The one gaming expert in the group gave up in disgust at our 
feebleness!! More practice needed... (:-))

(And my opinion on UT is completely unashamedly biased by not having 
seen any of the other shoot-em-up games since before the last decade!)


Day two comes soon (tomorrow, Sat (:-)).

All welcome.

See you there,
Martin



-- 
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Martin Lomas
martin at ml1.co.uk
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