From quilley@shaw.ca Tue Sep 21 15:49:26 2004
Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 15:48:08 -0600
From: Chris <quilley@shaw.ca>
To: Bruce Sass <eln@linux.ab.ca>
Subject: Re: LSD InstallFest

On September 21, 2004 12:47 pm, you wrote:
> Hi Chris,
>
> I would like to publish a piece about the InstallFest you and the LSD
> folk organised, and hope you have the time to answer a few questions.
>
> How did the InstallFest go?

The installFest went incredibly well. We had WAY more attendance than we were 
expecting. By the end of it all we had done 22 installs over the two days of 
various distros.

> What was attendance like?

We did 22 installs and had many more people come through on friday to check 
out the displays. We had slightly less people coming through saturday, but 
still had many people. I would peg our attendance levels somewhere near 100 
people over the two days and probably closer to 130-150ish.
> How many systems did you install?

22.
> Which flavours of GNU/Linux were used?

Suse, slackware, gentoo and fedora core were the ones requested. We had 
mandrake available and a bunch of other distros, but no bites. I think we 
even did a yellow dog linux install, or are working on getting one going 
because two people wanted to try it but our ppc linux guy wasn't around at 
the time.

> Were many people looking for help with their existing systems?

We had only two guys come in looking for help with existing systems. We had a 
couple of guys who had tried linux before and wanted to try it again, but 
overall it was mostly new users who were getting installs.

> Did many attendees appear to have had previous experience with Linux
> or other unix-like operating systems?

Many of the people that showed up but were not getting systems installed had 
previous installs. A bunch of people from #edmonton-lug showed up on the 
second day and various sys admins from the uni showed up to check it out as 
well.
> What kind of infrastructure was available for the event and how much
> of it did you use; were there enough volunteers, who supplied the
> hardware and 'net connection?

We had access to the net via the university's connection. On the second day we 
tried to setup our own personal network using a 10/100 managed cisco switch 
lent to us by Daniel from #edmonton-lug. The hardware for demos was all 
supplied by LSD members such as David Grelli, Mike Edwards, Adam Wolfe Gordon 
and myself. Kees Den Hartig supplied the net connection. he is a sys admin 
for the university.
> What would you do differently?

Lots of stuff. The first one is always a good learning experience;) We would 
make users do a usage survey before we installed so we could weed out the 
people needing their modems activated and other potential issues. We would do 
our own network and have a machine setup with ftp and mirrors of most of the 
major distributions. We were supposed to have that this time but Charlie's 
machine got fried by the power outages and he couldn't come out to the 
installfest. I'd do more advertising at other institutions like NAIT and 
Grant macewan. I'd try and get on as k-rock's cause of the day to get 
advertising there. I wouldn't schedule the people who are supposed to be 
organizing it (Myself and Mike Edwards primarily) as installers or greeters 
so we could float around more and make sure things are going smoothly. I'd 
arrive earlier to setup the demo machines. We arrived with an hour to setup 
before the installfest was supposed to start but we got swamped at about 9:45 
am and didn't get the demo machines setup quite right the entire day because 
of it.


> Will you do it again?

Absolutely. I may not be organizing it again, but LSD definitely will be 
putting on installfests. We will almost certainly put one on at the same time 
next year and there is talk of doing another one at the end of the winter 
term (marchish)


> Do you have any words of wisdom for someone contemplating an
> InstallFest of their own?

ADVERTISE! The whole purpose of doing an installfest is to raise linux 
awareness. Be creative where you advertise because places like the ELUG 
mailing list are not good advertising locations. You don't capture any of the 
market you should be targeting, which is new users. 


Regards,

Chris