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Re: Installation Party Summary



I see that the first Installation Party was not a total loss.  Some 
things were accomplished, and enough serious brains are trying to draw 
conclusions and figure out how to do better next time.

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

Maybe not absolutely necessary.  People can do it on the spot 
simultaneously, using MS-DOS tools or whatever.  Then hear a lecture 
about installing Linux while their hard disks are busy whirring and 
purring and defragmenting themselves.

> 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.

I assume that even newbies may have special needs which require them to 
have a distribution different from the Holy Standard Distribution to be 
chosen whatever it is.

> 3. Aren't network installs are more trouble than their worth?
[... snipped description of some Finnish tortures ...]

I agree.  This may have been worth it in the pre-CD era.  Now there are 
CD-ROM drives which can be connected via the Parallel Port, people no 
longer need network installations to avoid having to swap 40 diskettes.

> 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.

As suggested above, another approach is for the organizers to provide for 
a CD-ROM drive connected to the Parallel Port.

> 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).

VERY GOOD IDEA!
Have the users bring the display and video card user's manuals (I 
remember having had pored for a while over my display's user's manual 
while fine tuning my X configuration).  In other words, add to the form 
also a checklist of what hardware manuals to bring with the PC.

Also list what MS-DOS tools can be used to figure out the information 
(taking into account also PnP devices' reconfigurability).
                                                        --- Omer


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