Installfest

What's the big deal? How can I help? Topic Wishlist Installed Distributions Available Distros Archived Distros History May 09 Sept 08 May 08 Lessons April 08 March 08 Past Coordinators Volunteers Gotchas

What's an Installfest?
The Linux Users' Group of Davis helps people install, configure, and fix Linux installations at this usually-monthly event, held on Saturdays or Sundays at UC Davis. As of April 2008, they are held at the Experimental College.

Next Installfest is July/August ?, 2009

• We need a new location again
  

• Might be able to get 1003 Kemper Hall(Engineering II), Dean's Conference Room for the Engineering School again.

For the details and to RSVP to bring your computer in go to http://www.lugod.org/if

What's the big deal?

• Free Software
  

• Including the freedom to modify it as you please ... (as if we are all hard core programmers)
  

• Community Support

How can I help?

• Volunteer at Installfests
  

• Post a few flyers, usually available a few weeks in advance at http://www.lugod.org/documents/flyers/
  

• Come to LUGOD events
  

• Spread the word, and discs containing Free and Open Source Software

Topic Wishlist

(Please add your ideas here/ mark if you'd be willing to lead a workshop)

• File sharing on a mixed network: Windows, Linux & Mac : Samba, NFS, NTFS, VFAT, SFTP, FTP, SCP, webdav... - who?
  

• Media Servers + MythTV -
  

• Wireless: -
  

• 3D accelerated Graphical effects, dual displays -
  

• Desktop Optimization: customizing your panels, keyboard and mouse -
  

• Photography on Linux: Raw processing, batch resizing, photo editing -
  

• Graphic Art on Linux: Inkscape, scribus, blender, etc -

Installed Distributions

Survey of Linux Distributions installed at each event:
For more information on each distribution and links to download see http://distrowatch.com

* See Notes in the History

Available Distros

Distributions Available at Installfests (as of 05/15/09)
(You can request others, jump over to Lugod's website and send us an email)

• Fedora Core 10 (i386/amd64)
  

• Kubuntu 8.04,8.10,9.04 (i386/AMD64)
  

• OpenSuSE 11.1(i386/amd64)
  

• Ubuntu 8.04, 8.10,9.04 (i386/AMD64, some PPC (7.10 or earlier))
  

• Xubuntu 8.04, 8.10,9.04 (i386/AMD64)
  

• CentOS 5.2

Archived Distros

Advanced notice required.

• Debian (i386)
  

• Fedora Core 7,8,9
  

• FreeBSD 6.3 (i386)
  

• PCLinuxOS2007
  

• Slackware 11.0, 11.1, 12.0 (i386)
  

• SimplyMepis (i386)
  

• Kubuntu 7.04, 7.10
  

• Ubuntu 6.06,7.04, 7.10
  

• Xubuntu 7.04, 7.10

History

(Reverse Order)

May 09

• Topic: How to choose a distro without starting a fight.
  

• Included one netbook install using the new Ubuntu Netbook Remix from a usb flash drive, and one WUBI
  

• New room worked well, wired access was very useful.
  

• 3 Installs, about 3-6 spectators/helpers were there at various times

Sept 08

• Topic Discussed - Partitioning, Dual Boots vs. Virtual Machines
  

• We did 2 Vista/Ubuntu dual boots, using Vista to shrink the partitions to create space for the Ubuntu installer. Grub worked fine.

May 08

Wireless is now improved in the Zinfandel Lounge in the South Silo thanks to the GSA for putting in a new moobilenet access point.


• 2 fresh installs, one on cir. 1998 laptop - note we used the 6.06 LTS(needed older cd drivers) which installed no X initially then added XFCE, Xorg, GDM, abiword, gnumeric, firefox and gedit oh and hal which seemed to make the ethernet card work again; for a fast and simple machine. Other fresh install was on dual boot Vista, seemed to work ok using Vista to change the partitions(was done before arriving).
  

• For those who didn't come you missed a chance to tinker with an OLPC while we waited for packages to download.

Lessons

• If you're having issues running OpenGL apps, try turning off Beryl.
  

• If X breaks on a dist-upgrade, finish the upgrade via command line then run a dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg.
  

• New fedora releases have a lag before community packages get built. ie. ndisgtk isn't available yet
  

• Keep some good older distros around for older machines.

April 08

We tested out the new location of the Zinfandel Lounge in the South Silo. Wireless proved to be a bit spotty as thought, although a moobilenet router may be installed close by soon.

March 08

While we only did 2 installs, 1 was a custom live cd of Xubuntu which we installed on a bootable usb flash drive. Also the crowd of spectators/discussion participants was quite large, 7-8 of us.

Past

Back in the day, and apparently still on a server the CS Club and LUGOD had a great idea to help people learn about Free and Open Source software.

• The old csclub page http://wwwcsif.cs.ucdavis.edu/~csclub/installfests.html

Coordinators

• 1999? - 2003? : Rusty Minden
  

• 2003? - 2005 : Jonathan Stickel
  

• 2005 - 2006 : Seth Nagao (co-coordinator)
  

• 2005 - 2008 : Chris McKenzie (co-coordinator)
  

• 2006 - present : Alex Mandel (co-coordinator)
  

• present - future : Could be you

Volunteers

A thank you to all those who come to help out.
Nick S., ct, Mike, Tony, Chris T. ...

Gotchas

Things we figure out and sometimes forget.

• In a standard U(Ku)(Xu)buntu install network manager sometimes causes problems, notably you can't save the location profiles, the nm-applet doesn't indicate signal strength.
  

• Reinstall from the Ubuntu alternate disc (even on a Xubuntu system) or try wicd which has to be downloaded from sourceforge. If that doesn't work try wlassistant with either wicd or network-manager installed.
  

• ndisgtk a new gui for config of ndiswrapper, real easy.
  

• For some older machines if installing a U(K)(X)buntu flavor you may need to go with and older version or the minimal CD, note option 2 here only works if you have a wired connection.

If you have been to an installfest, please write about your experience

Comments:

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2007-12-30 15:07:14   Rusty Minden helped me install Debian Woody on my 486, thanks very much! —NickSchmalenberger

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2008-03-05 11:10:31   iPod Linux too? —CarlMcCabe

Sure, RSVP for the next one and we'll give it a shot. I've done a Familiar install on an Ipaq PDA and imagine it's similar in some respects. —AlexMandel