[plug] Re: InstallFest hits the news

[Leon Brooks]

The following was sent in response to a query from LinuxWorld Australia. If
anyone has anything to add, particularly Committee members wanting to bless or
veto any part(s), send it to Rodney Gedda <rodney at linuxworld.com.au> (but don't
bother the man if it's trivial).

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Rodney Gedda wrote:
> (1) How many people attended?

More than a hundred. Possibly as many as 150. Lots. We were glad that we hadn't
advertised more widely, since not everyone who attended was seen to on the day.
We booked them in for installing on one of PLUG's regular workshop sessions.

We learned a lot from this second installfest, and one thing which will be
different next time is that the registration forms will be *required* for an
installee (although there is no compulsion for them to write accurate or indeed
any personal information on the form other than some name for identifying them
in the crowd), will have tracking information on them, and will follow the job
to completion.

One interesting mistake was made with the otherwise excellent CanTech
facilities; someone plugged a rather large circuit into a fan power-point to
ease the load on other phases, and at 17:00 the building-management circuitry
switched the fan circuits to timer-only. About two dozen machines suddenly found
themselves powerless, and I was glad I'd installed on ReiserFS all around.

> (2) How many installs/configs?

There were 54 registration forms filled out, there may have been a few more
installs, and there may have been a few registrees who backed out.

> (3) How many installers were helping out?

Officially, 19. In practice, probably about 30, which represents almost all of
the active club membership.

> (4) What range of hardware was there on the day?

Where do I start? As well as the usual bulk x86 minitowers, there were about ten
laptops all up, and only one (a Mitac) was a problem child (oddly enough,
another visually identical Mitac was not). Even in the x86 machines, there was a
lot of not-quite-mainstream hardware around like LS-120 and Jaz drives, funny
IDE CD burners, scanners, a Sony DSC-F505 digital camera, and internal modems.
Some of these modems worked, AFAIK *all* of the other odd peripherals worked.

There were many PowerPC machines, Macintoshes, Sparcs, a large black
rack-moutable monster which Indulis hauled along from IBM, and another beastie
whose name I didn't get, which arrived running AIX.

Monitors ranged from a 21-inch NEC monster provided by the Book-Keeping Network
to a tiny 9-inch IBM brought along by Nick from the University Computer Club. We
had projectors as well, but never found time to plug them in.

> (5) What was the physical layout of the room like?

Your basic rectangle, maybe 10m by 20m, with moveable partitions down the
centre.

> (6) Any presentations/demonstrations? If so, what were they about and were
> they well attended?

There were several demonstration systems running/available but no formal
presentations.

We had a large workstation showing KDE-2 and Konqueror (a Mandrake 7.2beta
install), several laptops likewise (one Compaq Armada E500, featuring a simple
but brilliant educational game called "Atomic Entertainment" (katomic) kept a
ten-year-old rivetted to the screen; her father stayed for a long time looking
at other things, but even so came close to literally having to pick her up and
carry her out when he wanted to leave).

We had not the resources (people or room) to do presentations. By next year we
will have enough members to do this. Some of the attendees were random drop-ins
who'd seen the signs (which simply said "installfest" and pointed: no Linux, no
penguin) and were curious. Since the next session will be better advertised, we
will get more of the curious and so should cater more to them.

> (6) Please feel free to add anything that you think is worth a mention.

The system and structure which we did have in place served us well. We plan on
increasing the structure a little for the next session, but not so much that it
impedes the free flow of people and information.

The little advertising which we indulged in was noticed, so we plan on putting
more effort into promotion in future.

This definitely has the feel now of having reached critical mass. Sponsorship
and material help from Canning Tech (our hosts), IBM, Caldera, TurboLinux and
others combined to make things easier and more "permanent" in appearance. I
think this helped many attendees and installers to take what they were doing
more seriously, and to see the great value in it.

One attendee was looking for a solution for his second-hand book business, and
had a significant thing to say. He'd asked the large book-sellers what kind of
system he should look at setting up, and they had without exception recommended
that he get a Linux or Unix solution of some kind.

> To compliment the article, it would be great to have some photos. Does
> anyone have happy snaps? ;-)

http://plug.linux.org.au/~leonb/ (last link on page)

-- 
A father is someone who carries pictures where his money used to be.