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Re: Installation Party Summary
On Sun, 27 Oct 1996, Omer Zak wrote:
> > 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 arebusy whirring and
> purring and defragmenting themselves.
definitely have them do it at home. one guy came with a large disk, we
found a lot of garbage floating around in scandisk, many lost clusters
(and it took a while to check), then the defrag marked WAY too many files
as unmovable, I quit win95, attribed all the disk with no system, hidden
or readonly files, went back it to defrag only to discover two files are
still unmovable close to the end, fugured it was the registry, quit win,
renamed and recopied both the registry AND it's backup and only THEN he
could run FIPS. the above process took a precious 30 minutes neto of my
time, but 3.5 whole hours bruto of the poor newbie, because I was hopping
between installations all the time. I think it IS necessary with all the
BABLAT you suffer from win95's VFAT filenames these days.
>
> > 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.
true, I installed slackware96 there for the first time, after two times I
went NUTS and installed RH from there on. I believe newbies no nothing
about what they need, but I know what I can install more easely. you set
up RH once and let it run, while Slackware asks you questions all the
time, even in menu mode. anyone wants to make a ready-made tag file for
next time? that would help...
>
> > 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.
I came with two X8 CDROMS (atapi) and they travled all around. I think it
would have also be good if the NFS worked better. RH4.0 works great
through FTP too, so it's even easyer to set up...
> As suggested above, another approach is for the organizers to provide for
> a CD-ROM drive connected to the Parallel Port.
btw, is that supported by Linux installations at all?
> > 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 dotclock), 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 thePC.
that will drive people away (understandable). people brought me computers
they "bought only 4 days ago" and they didn't even know what graphic
accelerator they had... the guy had an ATI, which appears at the bottom
corner of his win95 taskbar, but even when I told him he didn't know what
that means... total newbies don't know what an IRQ is, man!
>
> Also list what MS-DOS tools can be used to figure out the information
> (taking into account also PnP devices' reconfigurability).
and most importantly: NOT SO MANY PEOPLE!
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Ira Abramov <ira@scso.com> Scalable Solutions
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