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The First-Ever Installfest in Egypt
from the pent-up-demand dept.
"The atmosphere was just unbelievable; people who had had linux installed realised the LUGgers were overwhelmed and stayed on helping other people with installs, we couldn't burn CDs fast enough, several thousand educational pamphlets were not enough by a wide margin. We were expecting maybe 150 or 200 people throughout the day, but we had already reached that number by 9:45 a.m. (15 minutes before opening!). To the best of our knowledge, the most successful LUG-driven event in the middle-east, certainly the biggest, and one hell of a day that we'll all remember. Note that we are now looking at the possibility of another Installfest during summer at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina and would welcome any extra resources. (A big thanks to MadFarmAnimalz' family who served the volunteers sandwiches carefully wrapped in copies of the GPL preamble and the deCSS code)"
Since they asked for it (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Since they asked for it (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Since they asked for it (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Since they asked for it (Score:5, Funny)
Aziz, light!
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They are nerds now! (Score:3, Informative)
Network Install (Score:5, Informative)
I found that many computers support Network Booting, which RedHat [redhat.com] supports easily. While not every machine supports it, doing net installs on the machines that do frees up CD-ROM drives and CDs for the ones that don't.
Re:Network Install (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Network Install (Score:5, Insightful)
Debian allows you to boot from CD, do a minimal installation {just enough to get the network up}, then eject the CD and finish the rest of the installation from the Internet. And it has no way of knowing whether the ftp.country.debian.org it's connected to is the real one, or just some LAN address that a bullshitting name server gave them which happens to contain a full mirror, but runs at full 100Mb/s rather than ADSL rate. {Unless you have > 200 clients connected to that server
I'm sure the same technique could be applied to other distributions, though
Perhaps someone will make an InstallFest kit, with a full mirror of a distro {Mandrake would be my favourite for this application -- n00b-friendly, good hardware detection, easy graphical setup, not sure though how it handles installation from network}, a DHCP server and a hacked BIND {to manage the aforementioned DNS spoofing}, and an ISO image of a minimal network install / recovery CD {itself in the form of an installable package, but with a depends: cdrecord and a recommends: k3b, just for ompleteness}. This net-install CD would hardly need any packages, so it could be quick to burn. You'd still need stackloads of blank media if you were giving them out rather than taking them back to use for the next person {and I'd think psychologically it's better that visitors do get a CD that they can take away with them}, but you might blag
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And now the real holy war starts (Score:5, Funny)
What about.... (Score:3, Funny)
*Ducks*
Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Internet2-based mirror (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Internet2-based mirror (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you fucking retarded? Internet2 is a network for academic research projects, not for you to leech l33t warez.
Are you fucking retarded? DARPA is a network for academic/military research, not for you to surf pr0n or whatever it is you anonymous cowards do with your time.
Re:Internet2-based mirror (Score:3, Informative)
Awesome job! Guerilla Marketing Campaign (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Awesome job! Guerilla Marketing Campaign (Score:5, Interesting)
We should have the whole thing ready for a slashback or something, including all the gory details of how IBM Egypt almost torpedoed us (believe it or not, they wanted the LUG initially to pay for the IBM volunteers' t-shirts and they wanted the LUG to pay to write IBM on the back of the shirts too... cue the "in soviet russia LUG sponsors IBM jokes.").
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Re:Awesome job! Guerilla Marketing Campaign (Score:3, Informative)
I am an egyptian my self, and have been using using linux for the last 6 years or so (have been out of the country for almost a couple years though)....A great number of IT staff in Egy. belive in lunux, countires like Egypt need such an OS, they cannot afford costy licenses, espically that copyright laws are strongly enforced over there(ofcorse with the funding of MS and alike).
Now that said,
mirror to help out (Score:5, Informative)
Damn... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's the way! (Score:4, Insightful)
reeddavid.com [reeddavid.com]
mirror in .de (Score:4, Informative)
Egyptian-style penguin : ) (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Egyptian-style penguin : ) (Score:4, Interesting)
None of us really believe he's a med student though; he can't possibly have the time.
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Bring On The Stats (Score:5, Interesting)
With 3 more users, they could pass nepal.
Re:Bring On The Stats (Score:4, Insightful)
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How to make this more efficient. (Score:5, Interesting)
The only problem I can think of is verifying that what's on the CD isn't malicious code. Hmmmmm... That's a tough one. Maybe a better idea would be for Linux users around the world to each donate some money to a nonprofit organization created for the purpose of Linux Installfests. That nonprofit would then have thousands of copies of Linux CDs pressed each day, at a cost of almost nothing per CD. I can see how it would be in the best interest of all Linux distro makers, and all companies that use Linux as part of their strategy (e.g., IBM) to donate a few cents from each CD they sell to this organization. This organization would then routinely ship crates of CDs to LUGs around the world, for the purpose of installing on folks' computers, and giving them the CD as their welcome gift to the Linux community. If a nonprofit can't be started, then why not donate some of those CD duplication units that can make 10 CDs at once, or at least the funds to buy those things...
By making this community grow as much as possible, we will all be doing a great thing. It is likely that companies will produce hardware drivers, application software, and other products for Linux. It is likely that by experimenting with Linux, a lot of people will become a lot smarter about computers, and the ratios of 1337 users to the idiot users (that Microsoft helped create with its talking paperclips) will be more favorable.
Finally, some other folks mentioned network boots. Yes, I think this is a good idea. But still give folks a CD so they can reinstall if they hose their system.
Re:How to make this more efficient. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How to make this more efficient. (Score:4, Insightful)
You can burn 2000 CDs ahead of time, but what if only 200 people turn up? Then you are left with 1800 useless discs (after 2 or 3 months, nobody wants to have them as they are outdated).
On the local computer show, the usergroup usually has Linux CDs to hand out to members and to sell to the general public for something like 1 Euro.
They just have them printed at a CD factory, no messing with burning. And cheaper as well.
But how many to order, that is the big question.
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Re:How to make this more efficient. (Score:3, Interesting)
Installed ? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gentoo, Debian
Re:Installed ? (Score:4, Informative)
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Arabic support (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Arabic support (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Arabic support (Score:4, Informative)
The last I tried (a couple of days ago), Mozilla Mail still had some problems with bidirectional text editing. I'd call it marginally useable at this point - the functionality is there, and works, but there's no acceptable UI to allow new users to access it, and there are some annoyances, like plaintext messages displayed with the wrong directionality. Check out bug 96057 [mozilla.org] in the Mozilla Bugzilla.
KMail appears to work fine, until you try to read BiDi messages it formats with other mailers. They don't display correctly.
Evolution doesn't seem to support BiDi editing at all.
If there is good support for bidirectional e-mail somewhere, I'd love to hear about it, but I wasn't able to find anything I could give my parents and not hear complaints about me breaking their computer...
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Re:Arabic support (Score:5, Informative)
On modern desktops, Arabic works just fine [silverpen.de].
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Clothing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Clothing (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Clothing (Score:3, Interesting)
Also note that most women on the pictures are sitting, waiting for their men to join them again. There is only one woman to be seen at a keyboard.
It is the same all over the world
Speaking of Freedom... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Speaking of Freedom... (Score:3, Funny)
software to handle installfests (Score:5, Interesting)
You're going to have to pull it out of cvs , I haven't bothered doing any official releases or anything yet , its just a bunch of php scripts.
It lets you gather the number of each distro , type of CPU , harware type (desktop , laptop, etc) that people want linux installed and configured for, as well as the number of people turning up to help who can handle it. And you get a nice little graph showing you how many people sign up each day before the event.
There's another installfest project on sourceforge here [sourceforge.net]
Slashdot People can help - PLEASE MOD UP (Score:5, Informative)
If you want to help us, e-mail Khaled Mohsen [mailto] who was our liason there and just tell him that you as a linux user and/or open source proponent would like to thank him for helping out the Egyptian Linux Users' Group, and make sure to extend the thanks to Mr. Mohamed Al Sawy too through Khaled.
Show me the power of slashdot
Re:Slashdot People can help - PLEASE MOD UP (Score:5, Informative)
Khaled Mohsen [mailto]
and
Sawy Cultural Center [culturewheel.com]
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/. 'ed (Score:3, Funny)
seems that not only the web site, but the event itselft was slashdotted.
aN00bis? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:marketing (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:7 hours? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We now need one ... (Score:4, Informative)
Whatever... Egypt, despite being conservative when it comes to social matters, does NOT apply the "sharia" or other islamic laws (and, before you ask, yes, I live here). Actually, the governement is trying very hard to *fight* the supporters of sharia.
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Shariah and GPL (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:We now need one ... (Score:5, Informative)
I mean, if all that you saw of the west was Duncan Donuts, Levi's, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron and CNN -- found in American style malls around American style highways full of American cars -- you'd probably not be terribly fond of it. Some of the more insulated countries (I spent a little while in Saudi Arabia recently) are commercially very American, but there's very limited contact between normal people and westerners.
There's much more American junk in the Middle East than you find in Western Europe.
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