[clue-tech] Installfest report.

[David L. Anselmi]

Installfest went pretty well this time.  It was a good day to be inside 
and DeVry stayed open until 3pm (we didn't quit until 4)--they were 
doing some sort of open house or registration.  We had around 10 people 
(I may have missed counting a couple) and people seemed to be getting 
things done.

The people at DeVry are very accommodating.  A big thanks to them for 
making installfest possible.  Their construction didn't affect our room 
but the classrooms and commons are new and improved.  Our room had some 
new Cisco gear and I saw one of their tests.  Maybe I should see about 
taking a Cisco class from them.

At one point David Willson said that we had people who needed help but 
had no helpers.  We decided that when someone had a question a luminous 
blue question mark should appear above their heads.  I guess perhaps I 
should have done introductions to make people aware who was there and 
what they could help on.

I tried out a bootable OpenSolaris thumb drive.  It worked fine although 
it's kind of weird to have the usual Gnome desktop with the oddities of 
Solaris commands.  But it picked up wifi just fine (something that 
vanilla wpa_supplicant won't) and burned CDs (not exactly intuitive but 
a few extra clicks get you there).

It did seem to run hotter than Debian when just sitting there.  And even 
though it was running without a real disk there was a directory with 
space for an ISO in it.  That was handy.  Linux doesn't seem to 
recognize the partitioning of the thumb drive so I can't see what's on 
it very easily.

We did 2 kubuntu installs.  The first (after swapping a hard drive) was 
straightforward.  The second we only defragged and repartitioned Windows 
to make room.  That went smoothly even though defraggler showed the MFT 
right in the middle of the space we wanted.  Turns out the MFT seems to 
get relocated automagically.

Rex got wifi working, though it was just a matter of poking at Ubuntu's 
network widget until it submitted.  That's the second time I've looked 
at the thing and it isn't obvious what it's doing.  Someone else had 
trouble because he connected to Zach's AP and when that went away it 
wasn't easy to get switched over to the DeVry AP or wired.  Dang they 
need to fix that (knetwork manager seems better, if they've improved its 
stability).

We found a small bug in mount (on Ubuntu 8.04, IIRC).  When run as 
"mount /dev/sda1" (missing the mount point argument) it said something 
about a bad superblock, wrong fstype, etc.  Completely misleading. 
Debian's mount (from util-linux-ng 2.13.1.1) says it can't find the 
partition in the fstab, which at least isn't misleading.

Zach had an openwrt box that was a netboot server.  Pretty cool use of a 
little access point.  He also turned us on to unetbootin, which can make 
a live USB drive out of a bootable ISO.  So we used that to copy a Sidux 
live CD to USB and boot from it.  Pretty cool and having a stack of 
blank CDs to burn for people gets one step closer to obsolete.

We learned that Java 1.3 was EOL a long time ago and Java 1.4 just went 
EOL.  It seems you can still buy support from Sun for them but this is a 
case where porting code to new platforms seems worthwhile.

Bob worked on some twitter stuff, including some compiling.  It sure is 
nice when an app is mature enough to build easily and not much fun when 
that work hasn't been done.

Several people poked around with VNC, using it to provide "remote 
assistance".  I played a hand of bridge (via VNC) in a game running 
under Wine.  I was busy talking to the owners of the boxes and managed 
to set 4S by 2 tricks so that was kind of fun.  There was also talk of 
running Windows games under Crossover Office since some people got it 
for free last month.  But we hadn't installed crossover or looked at 
their support for games.  It looks easy to use.  No supported bridge 
games though, but they may "just work".

Since we got to stay late we ordered pizza rather than going to lunch 
after.  It was a lot of fun to talk geek for a while.  Most tech people 
I've worked with seem to be in "quick fix to my latest issue" mode 
rather than "let's imagine what's possible" mode.  Talking to the latter 
is what I've always appreciated about Linux groups.

So all in all we had a good time.  If you were there and had success (or 
trouble) that I didn't mention feel free to post.  If you weren't there 
plan to come next time!

Dave