[vox] Installfest?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Timothy D Thatcher (daniel.thatcher at gmail.com):

> > They heard that Linux runs on old hardware and they have nothing to
> > lose bringing their old junky hardware with the hopes we might be
> > able to spin up something interesting.
> 
> Errr, I always thought that was kind of the point of an installfest?

I believe you may have just volunteered to be the person at the
installfest who handles all broken PCs.  ;->

Personally at the CABAL/BALUG installfests, I found I had to be very
up-front about 'No, we're not a free-of-charge computer repair shop.'
Otherwise, you spend all your time doing that, _and_ you end up trying
to limp back into operation the most dismal components that really ought
to achieve their best and highest purpoee as landfill.

And these are _exactly_ the sorts of situation where such users don't
value your time and trouble, because they're getting for free what
they'd have to pay real money for at the local whitebox vendor.

> I've been thinking about installfests since they keep getting brought up,
> too, and having one as a "physical media distribution fest" actually
> doesn't sound like a terrible idea. Maybe prep some isos of a variety of
> more- and lesser-known distributions, bring a machine with a CD/DVD burner
> and fire them off made-to-order, and/or make a DVD with a variety of isos
> that people can take home and burn off onto their own media.

I'd suggest going totally the other way.  Have an installfest server
with a Web daemon, dhcpd, pxelinux (kickstart server), connected up to a
local wifi network and ethernet.  Stock the server's Web pages with some
informational pages, and offer download of distro ISOs _and_ also
over-the-network installation or running of those same distros.  (When I
say 'running', I mean like netbooting a live-CD distro via PXEboot.)

This way, the LUG can scale the installfest up to helping large numbers
of people simultaneously, the LUG doesn't need to provide visitors with
any supplies whatsoever (not even CDRs/DVD-Rs or flash drives), there's
absolutely no contention over resources, _and_ everything runs at
network speeds, _and_ you furnish a prime real-world demonstration of
what Linux can do.

For extra points, make the installfest server a ludicrously small one,
like maybe an Intel NUC.