[clue-admin] Installfest.

[David L. Anselmi]

Installfest was a great success, I thought.  We had around 30 people and 
most stayed the whole time.

Big, huge, whopping, penguin-love thanks to Jef and Batky-Howell for the 
space, it was great!  Coffee and soda made it much more pleasant than 
DeVry (no slight on them).  And it was nice to have access to the 
network services.

Thanks to Mike Benavides for the soda and CDs he brought, and to Collins 
for being there to help out.  And thanks to everyone who came and 
brought things like WAPs, slugs, and USB speakers.

The guy with the 16MB of RAM system left too early because a 64MB P-200 
showed up later that he could have had.  I didn't have a chance to look 
for embedded distros that might have worked for him.

Note for next time, 1/2 pizza per person.  We talked Papa John's down to 
$6/person including tip for 12 pizzas.  Otherwise it's $7/person.  Best 
to order before noon, it takes an hour or so to make that much.

About 8 of us went to dinner afterwards.  Brother's BBQ isn't crowded on 
Saturday night so we stayed until about 8pm.  Nice to catch up with 
everyone.

I had a (poorly advertised) server set up and wired into DHCP.  So if 
you could PXE boot (your NIC or an etherboot floppy) you could see a 
page listing 6 distros and the CLUE banner.  You could boot the 
installers for all six off the network and could do a network install 
with them.  The idea was to use the server as the netinst repository but 
not all of them worked since I hacked them together out of ISO images. 
So we'll call that beta1 and try beta2 next time.

We did a couple of netboot Ubuntu installs, and burned some SUSE CDs, 
and showed a guy how to hook an ISO up to VMWare.  With the range of 
hardware we get neither DVD nor netboot are sure bets.  CDs cover the 
best range.  The *buntu live CD isn't so good on older hardware. 
KNOPPIX is a better live CD since run level 2 saves you from KDE.

I'll try to put together a "what to expect at installfest" page to get 
people thinking about the hardware they bring and what their options are 
for installing it.  Give us a place to identify what we'll have on hand 
so they can ask in advance if they need something odd.

Got my first look at slack-based VectorLinux.  Very pretty considering 
it was on a P133.

We had one slug there and several of those Linksys-runs-linux-wifi 
things.  The slug was already unslung but no one to help the Linksys guy 
put Linux on his wifi.  So there's some market for embedded experts.

Might have been nice to have some press coverage.  Zonker, if there's 
any market for articles like that (or we can con him into writing for 
the web site).  What?  Did someone say newsletter?  No, I didn't think 
so. :-)  Or if Zonker's too busy then anyone who likes to write could 
put something on their blog, or our web site.  Hey!  Maybe I should have 
a blog for this and stop spamming the list with so many pages of useless 
rambling.  Well, next time after Jeff sets up a members' blog on our 
server.  It's a good thing you guys like me so much. ;-)

Next time will be in November up north.  We should probably try to do 
pizza if it's ok with the staff, and dinner if there's a good place up 
there.

After November I'm planning bi-monthly 'fests.  With 2 locations to 
cover I think that's valuable.  Six months is a long time for people who 
won't go to the opposite side of town.  I think it's a nice compliment 
to regular meetings for advertising the group.  There were several 
people I've never met on the lists or at meetings, and a few hadn't even 
found the lists yet.  But we can talk more about that at the admin meeting.

Thanks for listening.

Dave