Christos Bacharakis

Past Tuesday at Technical University of Serres, our local L.U.G. SerLUG organized an InstallFest. Let’s see the whole event from the beginning. Last week we (SerLUG) organized a presentation on “Creating a Fedora 9 Live USB Stick”. The next step was to organize a full day installfest for those who wanted to install Linux on their PC/Laptop and those who couldn’t create a Fedora live USB stick on their own.

The preparation:

So, we printed 100 beautiful posters, we posted an invitation/announcement at our University’s site but the best advertisement we got was by word of mouth as well as from our teachers who mentioned our event at their classes.

After that we had to make a list of things we had to do before the event and a list of things that we would need at the install fest.

The first thing was the room. We had to find a big room with everything. After hours of searching and asking at our University, our teachers provided us with a big room that had electricity, internet, many tables and chairs. The room was awesome!

Hopefully our teachers provided us with many things for our event, such as a room, a hub, a video wall screen, tables, many chairs and electricity. Generally they were friendly and wanted to help us as much as they could. They told us that our thought were great, that we have to continue promoting linux and that they will support us at every step we take.

The next step was to organize the room in order to make it more installfest friendly.

After the arrangement of the room, we set up our stuff and we were ready to install Linux!

The installfest was up and ready!

Let’s take a tour in our room…

Our idea was to split the room into six sections. The first was the “install” section were everyone could bring their Desktop/Laptop, plug it and install Linux. The second was the “Live” section with a Desktop ready to create Fedora 9 Live USB Sticks. The third and more important was the information desk were there was a table full of flyers, books, magazines and posters about Linux and generally Free & Open Source. There was also a videowall screen (our fourth part) for live demonstration but the rest of the day it was playing videos promoting Linux. The fifth section was the showing room were Serlug’s members had brought their laptops for a small intoduction to Linux for people that have never seen linux before. The last section was the “relax and flame” section were everyone could sit, relax and discuss.

As far as the installing itself is concerned, we decided to support and “promote” many distros but we mainly installed Fedora and Ubuntu, even though we had a variety of Linux distros available to burn and install, such as: Fedora, Ubuntu, Mandriva, Debian, Damn Small Linux, Kubuntu, Linux Mint, Gentoo, puppy, openSUSE and PCLinuxOS.

During the event many people came by to install linux on their USB Stick, Laptop or Desktop. But still there were people that came to solve some problems, discuss, flame or learn about something that they heard for the very first time, Linux. There was also a teacher who wanted to install Linux to a lab and asked for our help on selecting and installing the appropriate Linux distro on the old computers of the lab.

The truth is that we were expecting twenty people but finally we were surprised. The numbers speak for themselves:

Fedora 9 Live USB Sticks created: ~35-40

Desktops with Linux installation: 2

Laptops with Linux installation: 12

Linux Live CDs/Installation DVDs: 23

Attendances: ~150-200 people (~15 teachers)

After that I can say that the event was a success! We brought Linux closer to people, we brought ourselves closer to people, we made friends, found supporters, found many people who want to learn more about Linux and more important we found many people who want to help us promote Linux in different ways. Thank you all!

Credits to all SerLUG’s members and to our teachers who helped us out and made it real(the event).

Future list:

We are planning a second install fest in two or three months when we will need as much help as possible. We will need wireless internet support, more people with knowledge on how to install a Linux Distro and generally people willing to help. We are ready to bring our next installfest at World wide web through live video broadcasting and we will be able to receive and answer skype calls for those who want to participate in this party. If you have an idea or you can help us in your way, drop us an email at help@serlug.gr.