Installfest

Victor Cardona · 2002-09-07T00:10:11-05:00 (Saturday)

What are everyone's thoughts on holding an installfest sometime soon? I think it would be a great first event, and it would really compliment the intro to UNIX series that is being planned.

Victor

William Grim · 2002-09-08T04:12:21-05:00 (Sunday)

Oh yes! That would be a great thing to do; I'd love displaying a FreeBSD install. Maybe it could get rid of those notions that FreeBSD is hard to use.

Peter Motyka · 2002-09-09T01:32:13-05:00 (Monday)

I just want to get some feedback to try to help make this happen. Is this something we would like to do on a Friday night? I think that would provide us the most amount of time. If you can think of a better day, let us know.

I have a crabby old laptop that is waiting to challenge linux pcmica support. It will be sure to attend :)

Peter

Guest · 2002-09-09T10:56:23-05:00 (Monday)

I think its a great idea because I just recently installed linux on one of my machines and I sure could use some tweaking or configuration help. Still can't get my network card to work :(. And what about maybe a Saturday day rather than a friday night.

Ryan Lintker · 2002-09-09T10:57:30-05:00 (Monday)

What does a person need to bring to an installfest? Just the cpu, or all of the toys that go along with it. I've been wanting to get a version of linux installed, but have been a bit unsuccessful in my own attempts. It sounds great that a person like me could abuse LUUCS member's knowledge.

Stiffler · 2002-09-09T11:07:22-05:00 (Monday)

What distro do you want? If you want to learn everything there is about Linux, then Slackware or Gentoo would be good, but if you want to have it on your comp, then Mandrake or SuSE would be better. Then you have your BSDs.

Jon

Peter Motyka · 2002-09-09T11:25:36-05:00 (Monday)

I would personally like to see gentoo run on the little laptop I have. One problem is that the system does not have a cdrom drive and the pcmcia services are not supported by any linux distro boot disks (I have tried Suse, Redhat, Slack, Debian so far). My only option is using a laplink cable to copy the distro files via the lpt port to a fat partition and installing linux from it.

Anyway, we can get a myriad of distros stored on solar.cs.siue.edu and host them via nfs. I sure would hate for everyone to come out and then install via congested ftp mirrors. Lets start a list of the MUST have distros to have on hand.

Peter

Stiffler · 2002-09-09T12:23:24-05:00 (Monday)

The SuSE 8 bootdisk does support PCMCIA. You need to boot the disk, select manual, goto modules, select PCMCIA, and then do a install via PCMCIA or you can do a FTP Install from solar. You still got SuSE 8 ftp version up, right?

Jon

Peter Motyka · 2002-09-09T12:34:23-05:00 (Monday)

Yes they do support PCMCIA in a broad sense. I have just been unable to find a boot disk that will detect and control this specific PCMCIA controller. It does not seem to be an oddball vendor, it is a TI i think.

We can take this up at the installfest. Until then, lets hear some more suggestions on how to make the event more successful.

Peter

Stiffler · 2002-09-09T13:24:33-05:00 (Monday)

I suggested to Grim that at the Presentations on how to use Linux, we could hand out SuSE CDs so they get something for going to a lecture. SuSE has a free version of their OS. All you need to do is contact them, and they will send you ever how many copie you need. Then if there are some left over, they could be used at the "Installfest 2002". Good Idea? Bad Idea? I don't know which department to contact at SuSE, but they are always will to promote their product. The reason why I mentioned SuSE is that I think it is the easiest distro to install. Well, that's just _my_ opinion. Mandrake is also another easy one, but I don't think they hand out a free copy of their product. Granted you might need to pay for shipping on the CDs, but it won't be that much. SuSE, sometimes, gives out bargins to anyone that promotes their software.

Jon

Peter Motyka · 2002-09-09T13:38:35-05:00 (Monday)

Jon,

That sounds like a great idea. What does this free version consist of? I imagine it is a fully functioning verison of linux, but is it stripped down or something? I will poke around the Suse website and see what I can find.

I would love to be able to give away linux disk sets that are not just burned downloads.

Peter

Stiffler · 2002-09-09T15:35:38-05:00 (Monday)

They offer the CD as a DL off their ftp server, but I'd figure it would look better if it had SuSE printing on it rather than a burned CD. You can DL it and find out what's on it. Their is no commercial software on there that you need to pay for. I think SuSE can send you a copy of SuSE 8 Standard for free or a redused rate, and raffle that off. I forget what their promotions are.

I do know that YaST 2 and other gui bs is on that singul give away cd.

Here is the link to download theSuSE Evaluation CD.

Jon

William Grim · 2002-09-09T17:09:34-05:00 (Monday)

Yeah, I brought up SuSE at the meeting the other day. I'll contact SuSE this week and see what I can find out about getting CD's from them.

Also, I agree with Jon that as far as GUI linux distros go, SuSE is by far the best of the bunch.

Peter, I'll be willing to help setup gentoo on your system; although, I don't know how we'd do it with no CDROM (I thought you said that at least).

I'll make sure to bring my desktop system and put FreeBSD on one of the free partitions as a display.

If no one really wants to see FreeBSD; I won't bother. I'm primarily interested in just getting people to use some sort of Unix-like system.

Victor Cardona · 2002-09-09T17:48:20-05:00 (Monday)

I think saturday afternoon would be good. That way nobody has to miss out on their friday or saturday night activities.

Victor

Victor Cardona · 2002-09-09T17:51:22-05:00 (Monday)

I like the idea, and I love SuSE, but I think we should try to remain vendor neutral. We could always download and burn lots of copies of other distributions and then have options for people.

Victor

Installfest

Guest