I've come down with a cold this weekend. Fortunately, it didn't really come on until after the big Linux InstallFest on Saturday. (I hope that link doesn't disappear soon).

LIF3

The installfest on Saturday was awesome. Chadd, Mike, Dave, and I were there from 9 or so in the morning until 8 in the evening. We helped dozens of people get up and running with Linux or helped them with various problems they were running into while running Linux.

It was also great exposure for Iodynamics. Lots of attendees asked us what we did. Some said they'd heard of us but weren't sure what we did. So, it was a great to educate them. Hopefully, we'll get a little business as a result.

We had some great-looking shirts done in preparation for the installfest. Now we have an official Iodynamics uniform, of sorts. They look terrific.

We also printed a thousand bumper stickers that read “Are you using Linux yet?” and they have the Iodynamics website URL on them. They were very popular with the LIF3 attendees.

Me, helping a gentleman with a Linux install

It's only been a day since LIF3 and already a lot of people have praised the event in online correspondence. I thought I would share some of that here.

This was a great event for attendee and volunteer alike. The attendees walked away with the distro of their choice. The volunteers had a great time networking with their peers and meeting new people.

The LIF3 session I attended was, for me, probably the most productive 3 hours I have ever spent setting up something really new on a PC. Let's just say it was a revelation! Derek, the volunteer from Cedar City, spent most of the session working with me 1-on-1. Red Hat went in without a hitch and recognized all my hardware (except the stupid Winmodem).

Open-source is great. If B. Gates had conducted this session, it would have cost $500.

A new world has opened. My wife will soon be complaining about my spending too much time on the PC. I'm downloading PDFs from Red Hat and will be doing a lot of reading/twiddling.

Doran Barton spent a lot of time getting my garbage-pail system (I just kept tossing things in through the years) to accept a Red Hat server install. I feel I got a tremendous bargain, and learned a ton. I'll look for opportunities to pay it back or pay it forward in the future.

Thanks to Doran and all involved!

And here's a report on the activity posted by my Iodynamics partner Chadd:

It was not only a big success in terms of hooking up people with Linux installs and other know-how, it was a great convergence in the Utah Linux community. Many souls were brought into the true fold, and there was much rejoicing.

XMission and everyone who sponsored or volunteered really delivered the goods at this Linux-powered, caffeine-fueled freakout. There were some NASTY install problems, weirdly configured machines, conflicts, and all manner of arcane hardware. One guy had a rack-mount server donated by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management -- the thing looked like a hand-me-down refridgerator and required two people to schlep it around.

Anyway, I informally tracked success among the participants of each session and I counted four people who did not walk away with a working system. There may well have been more whom I missed. Everyone else got Linux installed and/or had their major questions and issues resolved. Those who couldn't get Linux up and running had faulty devices or hardware that was simply too exotic to overcome during the sessions (4 hours can really fly by when you're installing Linux on, say, a Pentium 90).

I was impressed by the high rate of success among laptop users -- there was a time when Linux and laptops did not get along very well. At LIF3, however, I didn't notice many laptop users who had major problems.

Iodynamics threw its entire staff at LIF3 and we worked all three sessions. Doran Barton tackled the more complicated cases while Mike Morgan, Dave Baker, and I worked the routine RH9 installations. As often as possible, we installed Redhat from our installation server, which worked REALLY well.

Since we were stationed at the front of the room, Iodynamics directed traffic and performed a kind of triage -- diagnosing participants as they came in the door to match them up with tabletop space, installation discs, and finding the guru who was best suited to help with each case. This was great for us because we got to interact with practically everyone who came in.

Iodynamics demo'ed some common applications, including Xine for DVD and mpegs, xmms for mp3s, and OpenOffice and the GIMP for productivity. We also gave tours of KDE and the Linux desktop in general.

The 4:00 p.m. session seemed just a little lighter than the other sessions, but there were several lingering problems from the previous session and many new challenges (like the Acer Pentium, and that 5-hour Gentoo installation -- SHEEEESH!), so, hard-core gurus were in short supply at times.

I think I can speak for everyone at Iodynamics in saying that we had a stone-cold blast and we learned a LOT (even Doran). We will definitely be around for the next one.

So there you go!