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Tom Brough wrote: | | This is all true, and I have to admit attending 5 of the above myself
| however one observation I would like to make is that I have noticed a | tendency / trend towards limited time span between conception and | implementation of meetings (some times weeks (as in 2) mostly days. For | example last Saturdays meeting was initially proposed by Simon on 21st | (correct me if I am wrong but that is the earliest reference I could | find) and implemented on the 28th that is to say a whole 7 days for | people to get there acts together.
Sorry, I had intended to hold the meeting end of October, but Kai said he was going away, and it would have been a shame to have a Debian meet without him, which forced the deadline.
Crazy not mad ;) And he's come back down this way since then, so maybe he ain't that crazy after all.
| My point however, is that I feel its time that we planned and | co-ordinated something with the public (non-member) in mind, or given | the vast area (in land mass) that DCGLUG covers compared with other | GLUG's perhaps a roadshow taking in major venues in Devon and Cornwall.
Unless anyone has great transport for it, I think a road show is challenging, even HP use to have fun keeping their lorries on the road, working, and demo'ing, and they spent big bucks on it.
We can materialise with a reasonable selection of laptops though - and I think these days 99% of stuff can be demo'ed adequately on a laptop, even things like LVM. Especially with members who now have things like CD burners on laptops.
Anyone game for all turning up dressed the same for business like events - be it a geeky teeshirt, or a suit? Tux ties....
Certainly I am happy to help produce equipment necessary to demo, or install Debian, pretty much anywhere in the region, although West Cornwall really is a bit far to drive for a single days meet from Exeter, and I'm sure the feeling is mutual. Make it a weekend in West Cornwall....
| And secondly perhaps its time to have an area on DCGLUG that caters for | "newbies"
I think splitting the list, even for simple questions, is a bad idea. It hasn't worked for other things in the past. I don't see a plethora of "daft" or "trivial" questions, and in my experience it is precisely the most experienced who can answer the "daftest" questions with the greatest clarity.
I also don't see a great deal of deep technical discussion on list which would scare a beginner, and even if you don't understand all of it you gleam bits of what is possible, and who can help. I mean which of us would know Theo was a LARTC guru if he hadn't asked questions we couldn't answer on it? So now when I get an interesting advanced routing or traffic shaping issue I know who to email ;)
As regards "what can be done in a day" (from another thread), I think the answer is a lot more than could be done back in 2000.
With Matt's Debian mirror we had Debian going in bottlenecked only by the archaic 10 Mbps hub on Saturday, in most cases both ends could support 100Mbps, and we could have been pushing in an entire CD's worth in a minute with a 100Mbps switch, the bottleneck became how long before it ejects the netinst CD so I can move onto the next PC (we only had a couple of boot CDs, but then we didn't do that many installs, although a lot of upgrades, and looking at other packages). No CD changes, no slow downloads, this is a very slick way to install an OS on such events, and worked exceptionally well on Saturday despite being the easiest of the things we set up for the event (despite the two day download).
For Saturday I made a "plug and go" network, and despite a weird glitch with DHCP, we were able to basically wheel in hub, cables, server, wireless bridging device, and be doing Debian installs in a matter of minutes, and also patching and burning over the wireless LAN. Having people sort these issues first made life simpler all around I think.
With LiveCDs we can see if someones PC is likely to work well with GNU/Linux, and give them something to take away, in about as long as it takes to boot a PC.
Oh and the people doing it have got better at it, well Mark, and Matt, and Neil, and Neil, and many others have, I think I'm beginning to ossify.
What I think is hardest is getting the layout of the meetings right. I like lecture style meetings (perhaps I've been away from University long enough). I learn quickest if someone explains that stuff to me upfront, and then maybe I play with it after to make the points concrete. I also like a clear structure, and well defined roles for people. I think that many other members prefer a more chaotic, lets install and play approach, maybe I'm a control freak ;)
Beyond UserLinux, I don't have any burning Debian topics to tell people about, but the UserLinux story is a good one for business users, and allows one to highlight ideas of freedom, and licences in a natural way that is relevant to businesses. So sign me down as a possible speaker/demonstrator, but I personally don't have the time, or energy to organise another big meet before late spring 2005. But happy to help if someone else can do one earlier - early December is good for me. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Comment: Using GnuPG with Debian - http://enigmail.mozdev.org
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