Before you go handing out CD's to the general population of campus, you should 
consider the technical support impact this will have.

The average person, if they manage to figure out what to do with the CD at all, 
will almost certainly have problems and questions, and they will need someone 
to go to for help.  And, depending on how many CDs you hand out, you should be 
prepared for a fairly significant influx of technical support issues.

I highly doubt you will be able to convince OIT to hand out such CD's.  Not 
because OIT is anti-Linux or anything like that.  But because OIT must be 
prepared to provide technical support for anything they are going to hand out.  
And I'm fairly certain the OIT Help Desk is not equipped for any significant 
level of Linux technical support.

I don't want to discourage you from fighting the good fight, but if you want to 
do something like this, I'd suggest you be prepared to spend many an hour in 
people's dorm rooms during the first couple weeks of the semester helping them 
through simple problems.

At the very least, I'd strongly suggest putting together a VERY dumbed-down 
tutorial which describes how to use the CD and basic things you can do with it, 
and passing that out with the CD.

-Paul

On Mon, Apr 24, 2006 at 08:13:36PM -0400, John Demme wrote:
> We've been discussing getting boot CDs out to incoming freshmen when
> they move into the dorms.  If we can do this, we could put an
> installfest date and location for people who like it.
> 
> ~John
> 
> On 4/24/06, [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > It might be better to hold something like this at the beginning of the
> > semester when new students are arriving and getting their PCs set up.
> > Maybe  include some special information on things like how to connect to
> > the campus network and useful tricks for courses, such as how to run
> > Matlab remotely.
> >
> > Wasn't there some talk about passing out CDs of free software that would
> > be useful to students, or maybe getting OIT to hand them out?
> >
> > -Derek
> >
> > > After attempting to schedule Revolution OS with the Hoff theater for-
> > > literally- months, I've given up, and moved the money elsewhere.
> > >
> > > Unfortunately attemping this scheduling for this semseter has held up
> > > scheduling for an installfest to go along with it.  We can still hold
> > > an installfest in early May if people are interested, otherwise we
> > > will hold one early next semester.
> > >
> > > Thoughts?
> > >
> > > ~John Demme
> > >
> >
> >
> 

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