[clue-tech] Installfest report.

[Bob Meetin]

David W. helped me set up Samba so that I was successfully able to get 
my linux desktop to write to the windows virtual maching and vice-versa! 
Way to go! 

We also explored trying to get GPG compiled on my hosting site, but that 
went south because they didn't have the c compiler set up to run as me 
on my account (shared hosting).  Plan B - as it were, GPG is reasonably 
portable so ftp-ing over the binary was enough to call the day a 
stunning success. 

We also batted around the possibility of doing a holiday party sometime 
in December.  Timing, feedback?  I offer my humble abode as a sacrifice, 
however knowing in advance that few people on this list actually know of 
Erie or would care to do Erie.  We are open for options?

-Bob

David L. Anselmi wrote:
> 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
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>


-- 
Bob Meetin
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