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Insta-party suggestions
Hi.
This is my mail concerning the installation party.
First, I think the installation party went well in the sense
that many people got Linux installed. It did not go well in another,
very important aspect, which is that newbies understand what we
did. The solution for this is not necessarily to lower the amount
of people, as Ira said, but to be much better prepared and organized.
I tend to agree with the comments that an NFS server is too much hassle.
This was proven at the party itself, where at one point I got tired
of the idea and dumped Ira's Slackware 3.1 CD on two of my hard drives
and started distributing them around. That went REALLY well. So, the
solution is to bring many CDs, and several hard drives for those who
don't have CD-ROM drives.
I do not support requiring newbies to do anything at home. As Marc said,
I don't trust a newbie to successfully defrag and fips their hard drives.
>From the installation party experience I got, not all newbies fully
understood partitioning, hidden blocks, attrib, and fips.
Also, regarding bringing specs on a computer. People here have completely
overblown the X thing out of proportion. Monitor specs are needed in two
cases as far as I'm concerned - when dealing with REALLY ancient monitors,
and when tinkering X to get really kinky resolutions. But face it people -
most people were bustling with joy to see their computers running 800x600
at 16bpp. Except for the graphics card, I don't need anything to configure
X to do that.
I don't support Ira's idea for weekly lectures. It is wrong to do these
things abstractly, not to mention the fact that many people simply want
Unix installed and basic operating instructions. The correct way is to
have lectures DURING the installation party by reserving one guru at
a given time to lecture (or one lecturer the whole time). Again, this
can only be done if the party is smoothly organized.
And finally, without any relation to the party, I love the idea of meeting
at some joint and having fun together. Harvey also suggested this idea -
meetings not based on specific technical issues (lecturing etc.) or
administrative issues (amuta, parties). This could be just plain fun.
Anyone proposing a place?
Shay
--
Shay Rojansky, roji@cs.huji.ac.il Finger for PGP public key
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