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Upcoming Installfest

Started by Jarod Neuner, 2004-11-11T21:19:29-06:00 (Thursday)

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Jarod Neuner

I've been told that I should help with the Installfest stuff this year, so hi. Wow, that was a lamer introduction.
I like to teach people things. I know about a lot of linux things. Therefore, I offer my abilities to the extent of teaching linux things during an installfest.

To Windows Users: What do y'all need to know about Linux before you will start using it?

To Mac Users: Macs are awesome. X11 is now on Mac. Do YOU know what you can do with X11? =)~

To Grim and whomever else: Whatcha need help with?
Jarod......

William Grim

Hey there, Jarod.  Nice to meet you... actually, maybe I have already met you in person... I don't quite remember.  I know I've heard of you (you have stalkers, haha, j/k).

Anyway, it'd be nice just to have extra people with me that are knowledgable about Linux and don't mind speaking with people.  I don't know how you feel about Fedora, but if you're a user of it, an informational packet wouldn't hurt.  If you aren't a user of it, don't worry about it.

For an info packet, if you do happen to be a Fedora user, it would be nice to have a little CD with a PDF on it describing how to do an install.  Screenshots with captions and simple rules to follow would be nice.  Maybe one screen per page, making it easy to find their place if they get lost.

I'm going to have Debian info packets available and a good copy of the FreeBSD handbook for those interested in FreeBSD.  I'll do something similar with Debian as I'm asking for with Fedora.

Is there anything specific you would like to do more than just writing an info packet (which is entirely optional)?  If you have something cool you want to show to users to get them interested, tell me about it.  I'm good with Linux and BSD, and maybe we can show off something slick.... now what would that be?

What if we showed them MythTV or a personal router?  Or how scripts work and where to start with learning how to write them (maybe a short python code introduction and a short bash introduction).

I don't know, those are just a couple ideas... what do you think?
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Jarod Neuner

Unfortunately I have avoided Fedora (and most Red Hat derivatives) since the era of RedHat 6 - I always despised RPM. I use Debian primarily, but my most-relied on computer is a SUSE 9 machine. Given it's ease of use (and the fact that YAST is very thorough, I'd be willing do put something together for that distribution.

As far as things we can show off, I have fiddled with wine several times and might be able to impress a few gamers. I have used linux as a router many times and we can prolly show some folks how to put together a router/dhcp/web/ftp/samba/whatever else server within about an hour using Debian. I don't know about trying to teach scripting beyond some neat bash commands - it's important that a user be able to read and maybe modify some startup scripts.

Perhaps most important, I'd think that we should cover the unix filesystem and how it's organized. I remember that it took me hours to figure out how startup scripts worked and where configuration files were. Not to mention that it took almost a year to figure out that /usr/share/doc was almost as useful as google.

Bah, back to homework for a while
Jarod......

bill corcoran

i am awful fond of my mac.  i do use apple's x11 server (in OS X) for apps designed to compile and run in an x11/unix-like environment, and for displaying x11 apps running on a different machine (via ssh port forwarding).  so, what else can i do with X?

i bet there is not a whole lot of interest in putting linux on macs, being that i doubt there are even many mac users around, and that OS X is pretty rad to begin with.  i put gentoo on my ibook when i got it, because the transition from a linux desktop to mac os was such a big leap =)

the good:
-gnu parted can shrink your hfs+ partition for painless dual booting

the bad:
-gnu parted cannot regrow your hfs+ partition when you decide to stick with OS X because it's killer, and there are no airport extreme drivers for linux anyway =(

-bill

Jarod Neuner

The 2.6 kernel has airport drivers. Not sure about 2.4
Jarod......

bill corcoran

which is cool for people with airport (apple's name for 802.11b).  unfortunately, i have an airport extreme (802.11g) only mac.  afaik, AE is a broadcom card with an apple label, and broadcom has not been gracious enough to publish whatever hardware details are necessary to write a driver for it.  reverse engineering a linux driver for it sounds like a cool senior project...  though possibly a bit much.

not that it will do any good, but here is an online petition to broadcom:
http://www.petitiononline.com/BCM4301/petition.html
-bill

William Grim

Hello again.

I don't blame you for avoiding Fedora/RH.  I'm not really anti-RH, but I feel there are much better things for me to be using, such as Debian and FreeBSD.

I don't really have a problem with RPMs, per se, but I do have a problem with the ambiguity of them.  For a while, years ago, when I was trying out different distros like Mandrake and SuSE, I didn't realize that RPMs made a difference on each system.  Therefore, I'd always get RPMs for the wrong distribution.

As far as routers go, that would be a neat topic.  I currently have an FBSD router and am working on getting my first Linux router to work, but doing NAT on that just isn't as straight-forward to me.  It seems that all I have to do is do "iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -o eth0 -j MASQUERADE", but alas, it doesn't work.... I'll re-read that howto I had, b/c the iptables man pages didn't give much insight.

Covering the unix file system would be a good idea.  I, too, remember being confused by its layout.  I think I remember getting pissed when I couldn't figure out how to have something run at startup (started on Slackware).

The Wine idea also sounds good.  I personally don't do Wine; so, maybe that would be something you could handle better.

As far as Debian install docs go, I can go ahead and write them since it's my primary OS.  You writing SuSE docs would be good... I guess this means we're leaving Fedora out of the equation then.... darn  :evil:
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

William Grim

Don't mean to respond to my own post (living up to my title I guess), but I got the linux router thing figured out.

I must have missed it in the HOWTO, but I all my rules were correct.  I just had to enable ip_forward in sysctl.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Jarod Neuner

I'll write something up on SUSE over break. I won't have access to internet stuff, so CDs are the way to go (blah). I'm setting it up for my girlfriend, so the how to is liable to be a small novel ;p

I pulled down Fedora 3 last night as well - I'll give it a shot too.

bill - [http://www.xml.com/ldd/chapter/book/bookindexpdf.html] everything you didnt ever want to know about writing a device driver. It would make a fantastic senior project (not to mention job skill for a resume)
Jarod......

Jarod Neuner

I got some stuff for SUSE ready. As for Fedora...well...SUSE is ready~
Jarod......

William Grim

Awesome.  I need to finish up my documents also.
William Grim
IT Associate, Morgan Stanley

Jarod Neuner

cough cough

wanna do one of these soon? I can set aside time tuesdays, thursdays, fridays, and weekends. was gonna talk about it at the meeting, but I got watching Family Guy episodes and forgot about it =D
Jarod......

Bryan

see if you had been at the meeting you would know.  If you get together with Mike and find a time, Mike's in charge of LUUCS so just let your officers know what you need and when stuff is going down.
Bryan Grubaugh
Quickly aging alumni with too much time on his hands
Business Systems Analyst, Scripps Networks.