[conspire] (real) Installfest in a Box

[Rick Moen]

Hi, Grant.  Forgot to comment:

> ...as well as (ideally) a burned copy of the installed distro itself
> to take home with them so they can try to reinstall themselves.

This was of course a good idea, and might have been prompted in part by
my remark on Sunday that people one helps at an installfest should
ideally _always_ leave with re-installation media for their
distributions of choice -- and be strongly encouraged to actually 
use them, so as to be unafraid of the process, and not inclined to treat
their systems as delicate.

I left that point out of my outline, though, for a particular reason:
It's funny how many random people off the street expect any LUG
organiser to be an endless supply of free-of-charge CDs and DVDs, and 
frankly I got really tired of that.

I got especially tired of it during the dot-com bust, while I was
scraping by economically and was counting every penny, and yet an
endless succession of visiting idiots assumed I was Father Bountiful for
distribution media (and blank CD-R / DVD-R discs), just because they saw
that I had a few.  (I even found some of them helping themselves without
asking, but that was rare and not the real problem.  The real problem
was the attitude that I was somehow expected to be handing them out at
all.[0])

At the time, I lowered the boom by saying "Achtung!  You may buy my
cheap generic blank media with no warranty for the deliberately
outrageous price of $1 per CD-R or $2 per DVD-R.  Or you can make the
intelligence choice and visit Fry's Electronics, four miles from
here."[1]

But I don't _actually_ want to be in the business of selling media, any
more than I want to be sugar daddy for giving them away.  I'm not sure
LUG installfests would, either.



[0] We at CABAL also keep having this problem concerning, oddly enough,
things to drink:  Randoms off the street seem to expect that I'll have
fizzy soda cans with high fructose corn syrup for them.  My household
doesn't have that stuff _ever_, let alone push it on guests.  And the
odder thing is, groceries _are_ available a bit over a block away.

[1] Notwithstanding which, I'm often glad to give particular people
discs, burned and unburned -- but, basically, at my initiative, not
theirs.