I thought for the benefit of those interested in how our Gentoo Mini-Installfest went on Saturday that I would type a brief summary. (You may delete this email at this point if you like).
I set up the tables, chairs, power cables, network cables and switches on Friday night. Nick and Chris arrived before the others in the morning and we set up Chris's laptop, Nick's server and my Desktop PC as mirrors. I had one Mepis laptop and 2 Gentoo LTSP clients running in the garage to use ssh to the machines being "upgraded to Gentoo" (this allows copying from the instructions in a browser window into the ssh session and can save a lot of typing and typos). Nick's laptop served well as a diversion (Tony's son watched movies all day) Most punters seemed to have pre-read the instructions and understood what they were doing so the installations went fairly smoothly. Those that did not "finish" knew what to do when they got home and from the feedback it seems that all is well. The biggest hiccup was that Howard's machine needed the SuSE partition resizing (using QTParted) but it seems that the reiser partition was damaged so he has lost his SuSE installation. (Fortunately his most important stuff was backed up at home). Apparently his wife has not noticed anything different yet - she has the same and some more games to play with. emerge vmware gave Howard his ability to run Windows programs in a very short time too. Caleb Sawtell was very helpful with some xorg.conf tweaking to get Howard's X problems sorted - he now has extremely good resolution on his LCD screen. The day was topped off with fruit of the vines and hops and some very nice curry from the local Indian takeaway. Thanks to the punters and helpers for what I consider to be a successful day. (Lucky it was raining and our wives didn't have any gardening for us to do) Oops. Did I say "brief"? -- Robert Fisher (aka - Rob, Bob, Robbie, Robbo, Fish) FishNet Computer Services www.fisher.net.nz
