[clue-tech] Installfest wrap up.

[David L. Anselmi]

The installfest last weekend went very well.  DeVry gave us a nice room 
and was as welcoming as always.  (Read on with caution, I haven't had 
any coffee yet.)

I counted 17 people who came.  There were a few new installs and some 
upgrades done.  We made some progress on a Wine application.  I saw a 
few Linux games that were a lot better than what I've stumbled on myself 
(the kids will be happy to hear that!)

So what do you do when GDM starts X without a session (just a white 
screen and a mouse pointer)?  I think there are quite a few people who 
would reinstall, switch distros, or give up.  But the problem isn't 
really that drastic so we tried reinstalling the session packages and 
found out that a lot of things hadn't finished configuring.  Once they 
did the problem was fixed.  Of course virtual consoles were a life saver 
here, and it's nice to be able to isolate problems to a small subset of 
the system--one of Free Software's strengths I think.

David Willlson[1] is working on an interesting network problem so it was 
fun to talk to him about that.  (That's the great thing about ubiquitous 
networking--most of the problems are interesting.)  We talked about 
smoothwall and he tried out untangle.  untangle has a slick interface 
but there were some glitches.

<OT>
There were a few discussions about utility vs. freedom.  Many companies 
are using Free Software to make it easier to build their products (like 
the cherrypal), which might also enable services they provide.  Others, 
like untangle, and zimbra it seems, are using Free Software as a 
platform to support their commercial software.  They give away some 
basics (probably consisting of integration work) but charge for other 
parts (the software they've written).  That's an interesting contrast to 
projects like subversion[2].  The difference is in whether a development 
community evolves.  So it's beneficial not to have to reinvent your 
kernel or web server and focus on your application.  But it's also 
beneficial not to have to reinvent a software development group, which 
is a harder leap to make.
</OT>

The next installfest should be in September.  Stay tuned for details.

Dave

  1. There's an extra l there to make up for the one I left out last 
time I mentioned David.

  2. See Ben and Brian's talks at http://producingoss.com/, especially 
"What's In It for Me?"