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Installation Party Summary



Hi.

This is my attempt at summarizing proceedings the installation party on
the 25/10/96, at the Hebrew University Highschool, Jerusalem. This is a
personal look at things, and not everyone necessarily agrees with me. 

HOW IT WENT
~~~~~~~~~~~

The installation party officially started at around 8:00. I got
there at around 7:30 and started setting things up, including moving
computers to create free space for users' computers.

The first person entered at around 8:00, and others started streaming
in at around 8:15-8:30. Pretty soon the room was completely filled with
people and their computers.

When Jonathan Ben-Avraham arrived with his computer, we attempted to
get his computer up as an NFS server and do NFS installations from
client machines by installating network cards in them. However, this was
started after there were already a lot of people there so there wasn't
much time or attention and eventually, no network installations went through.

The first hour passed with very little installations precisely for this 
reason - many were waiting for the server to go up and start installing,
but it never did. This wasn't critical, since most people had to defrag
their hard drives and use FIPS to create a new partition for Linux.

Marc Volovic arrived with Debian Linux on CD-ROM, and I know that him and 
Amos Shapira installed around 3-4 computer with it. This took place 
relatively early because of the availability of CD-ROM.

At some point Ira Abramov arrived with a Slackware 3.1 CD-ROM. It was
passed around and many installations were made off it. I personally also
dumped it to two hard drives and made many installations directly off
these hard drives.

We also didn't prepare installation boot and root disks before the party
started, which meant there were about 3-4 sets of them going around.

The installation party ended just before the school itself kicked us out -
at 14:00 we were still "picking up the pieces" and starting to reorganize
the school computers that were there before. Please not that I was forced
to come in at 7:25 on Sunday just to get computers up. Yawn.

POINTS FOR THE NEXT PARTY
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Organization was VERY bad. Setting up the place, both physically and
otherwise (NFS server) started taking place 30 minutes before the party
started. Here are a few tips as to how to work things out:

  * Get the NFS server ready one day before, if possible.
  * Create many sets of boot & root disks one day before.
  * Remove all equipment from the room except maybe for monitors.
  * Schedule people to come at different times by talking to them
    personally. This would ease the load.
  * Get as many CD-ROM distributions and hard disk-based distributions.
  * Some people waited over two hours before being taken care of. Make
    a corner with seats, magazines and drinks for people to relax and talk.
  * Create a checklist for each computer (defrag, fips, boot&root...). Marc
    has volunteered to make such a list.

OVERALL IMPRESSION
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Despite having a pretty bad feeling after leaving the party (due to the
mess of it all), I'm pretty happy with the results. Around 30 people came
and at least 23 distributions were successfully installed (I personally
did around 7). This means we have 23 new Linux users out there, people!

Again, I should stress the organization was NULL and next time would
have to be better.

Please put this on the web site, Ira.

Shay

--
Shay Rojansky, roji@cs.huji.ac.il                 Finger for PGP public key



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