[clue-tech] Hot wash, 21 Jul 07 installfest.

[David L. Anselmi]

Well, not so hot anymore.  But it's less than a week so maybe it's a 
warm wash.

Here's the rundown of Saturday's 'fest.  I had fun so thanks to all who
came.  Jeff Haemer was there to represent BLUG.  Like he said on their
list, a little encouragement and relaxed attitude goes a long way with
people who are new to Linux.  You don't have to be a guru to help.

Thanks of course to Joanne for getting us the space and DeVry for being
there.  They have pretty nice facilities, all in all.  They only lack
free soda and access to their network infrastructure to be perfect
(well, we were spoiled at Batky-Howell).

I met the dean of DeVry Westminster.  She was giving out cookies in the
morning and bent over backwards to take care of us.  Well, we still had
to leave at 1330 (and it's not like they threw us out) but otherwise she
was very accomodating.

We had about 15 people all told, maybe a few more who left early (and
two women, is that a record?).  As usual Collins and Zach were helping
out and various others who wanted help (or at least to be left alone)
got pressed into helping too.  About 5 of us went to Senior G's for
lunch afterwards and that was a nice change of pace (for me anyway, to
be able to just sit and BS).

Sarge wins the "first on scene" prize.  He was waiting when I got there
at about 0745.  Dang that's early, so we jumped right in.  But there's a
Caribou Coffee a block east of Federal on 120th so you aren't just stuck
with Starbuck's.  Dennis wins "last man standing," hanging around after
we ate lunch.

Things that went well:

I got wireless to work.  It seemed that I could authenticate to the
access point but not get a DHCP lease (and of course Windows worked fine
on some laptop that will remain anonymous).  The fix was to set
NetworkManager (KDE) to use WEP 40/104-bit hex rather than the default
WEP passphrase.  Someone had WiFi working before me, though I don't know
what app he was using.  For Gnome et. al. I don't know what trick to use.

We initially had a question about wired access though that seemed to be
an issue with ports and cables.  I got on right away but it would be
worth going up ahead of time (or at least earlier) to figure out what's
working.  I'm sure some people were frustrated with the time it took to
figure it out.  My apologies.

I expect there were some other victories.  Brian had Vector Linux (dang
it looks nice for a P133) and Compiz Fusion (that was cool to see).  I
hope Sarge got somewhere with his audio but as usual I was roaming about
and rather unfocused.

Things that went not so well:

We got Ubuntu installed on a USB drive for Siegfried's daughter Ariel
but it wouldn't boot.  Seemed like LVM came up before the drive was
ready.  Maybe the initramfs can be tweaked, or skipping LVM will avoid
the problem but it's a bummer that we didn't get it to work.  Sigfried
has some unconventional approaches to Windows disaster recovery, but
they seem to work well enough (and he probably has enough of them to 
make a presentation out of).

Siegfried also had an MSI motherboard that caused a kernel panic in the
Etch installer kernel.  Not much you can do that early in the game and I
wasn't able to focus well enough to Google up the answer (I hope boot
params would do it).  We need to figure out which model MB that is and
file a bug against debian-installer (preferably with a fix), especially
if the Lenny installer has the same problem.

David was back to work on his winmodem (yeah, you geezers remember
those, don't you?)  It's a SmartLink 2800 and although we had
sl-modem-daemon and eventually sl-modem-source installed we didn't
manage to get the device recognized (or even the module loaded).  Seemed
to want a slamr and ungrab-winmodem module that Debian doesn't have.
Well, even unstable is 2 revs behind so maybe that will shake out soon.
Or maybe closer attention to the linmodem instructions would help.

David also wanted to figure out how to rip CD audio to MP3 with k3b.  It
seemed to use lame for that but even after installing twolame and
configuring we got a completely unhelpful error on encoding (no really,
all it said was "error").  So any k3b gurus, plan to come next time.

I get pulled in so many directions at these that I can't ever focus on
solving particular problems (yeah--that's the reason--really!)  So
I feel bad that we couldn't answer these questions.  For the others that
were helping, feel free to report your experience.  For those that got
helped, if you were disappointed feel free to let me know what happened.
It's not like we hire marketers for these things so we can't make it
better if you don't complain (or constructively criticize, if you prefer).

Dave

P.S. CSP seems to run their speed traps between 84th and 120th on 
Saturday morning, but they alternate between north bound and south 
bound.  (No, they didn't get me.  But everyone had to slow down to look 
at the blinky lights.)

P.P.S. The DeVry network guy called on Monday.  I a) apologized for 
bothering him about stuff that was our problem (the wireless), and b) 
asked about a boot server.  He said that they could set up an IP for 
boot service so we can do net boot installs next time.  Woo hoo!

Also, their Internet access goes through corporate now so there may be 
bandwidth limits in preference of on-line classes and such.  No surprise 
but good for us to try and have CDs and what-not available locally.

On the south side, he didn't have access to their network (all 
corporate) so he couldn't arrange the same boot service deal for us 
there.  But we'll make do.