[vox] Installfest? should be Wouldntitbecooliffest

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Brian E. Lavender (brian at brie.com):

> Back in the day when Installfests were fun, most of us struggled
> to get things working: sound, video, web server, partitioning, hardware
> support, you name it.
> 
> Those challenges no longer exist! 

Er....

> I propose installfest turns into a "Wouldn't it be cool if" fest. So,
> I propose that we turn it into that, a "wouldntitbecooliffest". No need
> to have people provide their installation challenges, cause there are
> none. No need to ask attendees what type of hardware they have: cause
> if it doesn't work, it probably still won't work!

Sorry, you've never in recent years solved a problem with getting
support for a too-recent or otherwise problematic chipset going?  I
have.  Never encountered in the recent past a laptop with a wifi chipset
whose manufacturer stupidly refuses the Linux community permission to
redistribute the required firmware BLOB (**cough** Marvell, Broadcom
**cough**), but that BLOB can be furnished via separate download?  I have.

I see this happen a _lot_.

Nothing wrong with this other thing, of course.  Those sound like fun.

But punting on installation because 'it probably still won't work', when
obvious things haven't been tried, doesn't sound good to me.

A better reason to not ask attendees what type of hardware they have is
that experience suggests that, if you're lucky, they don't know.  If
you're unlucky, they give you wrong information.

This is why you don't ask.  You boot a cutting-edge live-CD image (I
like Siduction, at the moment), and find out what hardware it has from
Linux.