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Installation Party Summary




Some organization comments/ideas:

1. The Washington Linux Users Group asks people to defrag & repartition
*before* arriving.  Maybe that would help...

2. I'd suggest settling on *one* distribution, and bringing as many
copies as possible on as many media formats as possible.  You should
have one copy per person, so that everyone can be installing
simultaneously.  If you can manage this, then you can also give
instructions from the front of the room, and have afew people going
around helping out with particular problems.

3. Aren't network installs are more trouble than their worth?
Cracking open multiple machines, plugging in cards, dealing with IRQ
&/or DMA conflicts, getting enough linux up and running to continue
with a network install, etc...  I'd think it'd take an absolute
minimum of 10 minutes to get a machine on the net, which gives a rate
of 6/hr, which means 3 hours of hardware hassles just to get 30
newbies on the net, let alone the network config hassles.  I think
it'd be *much* more efficient to just skip the server concept and make
sure there's one copy of linux per machine.

4. If having the organizers bring one copy per newbie is too hard,
then require people to bring their own copy.  It's cheap, and they'll
probably find it useful to have the cd at home anyway when they want
to install additional packages, search for special things, etc.  I'd
go so far as require a copy of linux on cd as an entrance pass.  If
they can't get a copy, I'm sure Ira would be happy to sell them at the
door.  If they don't have a cd-rom drive, they should either get one
:), or they should bring a copy on floppies, or they can stand in line
with 3 or 4 boxes of floppies to make a floppy distribution on the
machine someone brings for this purpose.

5. I often find that the biggest hassle with installing linux is
finding out the details of peoples' hardware.  So, lets have a form
for people to fill out before coming.  It should ask for *all* the
details of their system (what cards, what brands, what configurations,
what monitor (max hsync, max vsync, max dot clock), IRQs, dma usage,
hard disk (chs, partition table, brand, ...) ...).  If they come with
enough info, it'll make the installations more foolproof, less risky,
and make installing X easier (and safer).

Harvey


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