[vox] Installfest?

[T. Mark]

As both a poor person as well as a strong advocate of FSF.org et al, I'd suggest using the opportunity to show off hardware that's well in-line with the Free as in Freedom ethos.
The Raspberry Pi foundation is a charity devoted to.. well, here's their self-description:

#  We provide low-cost, high-performance computers that people use to learn, solve problems and have fun. We provide outreach and education to help more people access computing and digital making. We develop free resources to help people learn about computing and how to make things with computers, and train educators who can guide other people to learn.

Well ok, Intel's hw is likely more hi-performance, but but by cobbling together the bits needed to do the same thing with a Pi (at surely fast-enough speeds) all the astonished newbies can be impressed by the all-too-rare do-gooder manufacturer which avoids mystery binary firmware blobs (& partnerships with a monopoly?) etc..  I mean, contrast with this clip from the wikipedia page (which is quite lacking in licensing/openness description IMHO..)

# 24 October 2012 – The Foundation announces that "all of the VideoCore driver code which runs on the ARM" had been released as free software under a BSD-style license, making it "the first ARM-based multimedia SoC with fully-functional, vendor-provided (as opposed to partial, reverse engineered) fully open-source drivers", although this claim has not been universally accepted.[121] On 28 February 2014, they also announced the release of full documentation for the VideoCore IV graphics core, and a complete source release of the graphics stack under a 3-clause BSD license[224][225]

No big deal, but just a thought.


ps. wrt "scaling up" to "large numbers"..  we ought definitely post lots and lots of flyers if we want to get even a dozen folk, I'd guess.  Hopefully turnout shall  increase when word gets out about how awesome we are, of course!
--
https://twitter.com/linuxusergroup




>> 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.
>
> Neat idea.  Any takers? :)
>
> -- 
> -bill!
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