I remembered reading about some of these this summer, but I couldn't remember where I'd seen any of them at the meeting so I looked them up again a few minutes ago. One is called Virtual Linux and is at http://www.virtual-linux.org. It is based on Mandrake modified to run from a cd-rom drive on machines with or with out hard dirves. It includes a few applications so that one can get an idea of what Linux is all about without altering their hard drive, or even having to deal with a boot loader. It might be useful to have around at the install fest because it would allow people to see how Linux will work on their machine without a big commitment, and it might give those helping with the install an advanced warning if some kind of problem is going to emerge in the real install. The other one that I found is called knoppix at http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/. I haven't used either of these, so I'm not sure how well eiter works at the moment. I will test them in the next few days and see if they are relatively easy to deal with.
Also as I was walking back I thought that a discussion of some system administration tools might be useful for newbie types. For example SWAT vs Webmin vs editing the config file for samba for example. Also I've got cd's for Mandrake 8.0, 8.1, 8.2 as well as RH7.3. I have iso's for Mandrake 8.2 and FreeBSD versions 4.4 and 4.6.2. I don't currently have any of them shared, but plan to add them to my list of samba shares in the next couple of days. My computer is named brandonz with several alaises too. --Brandon
