[sf-lug] installfest Sat. @ Rick Moen's in Menlo Park/ Xandros response

[Rick Moen]

Quoting jim stockford (jim at well.com):

>    I'll try to remember to bring a variety of install CDs of
> various (old-ish) distros to the next meeting (monday,
> 7/17 at the Javacat).
>    Interested? Remind me, please. I can usually have
> CDs given two weeks' notice. 

I appreciate the offer very much, Jim, but it's not necessary.

One, I can and do download stuff pretty darned quickly, from ye olde
customer site with the heavy-duty bandwidth -- depending, of course, on
the throughput available higher up the line.  E.g., each of the ten Novell
SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop release candidate ISOs I downloaded this
evening took about three minutes. 

I _do_ need to fix some of the cabling for my house DSL connection in
Menlo Park, which could probably be faster than it is.  The day I
finished moving residences and kludged the new LAN together, I just used
the first thing I found that worked at all.  I really need to re-do it.

The other thing is:  Old-ish distros, regrettably, are in general best
deliberately discarded and _not_ handed out or reused -- because of
security hazards and because old installation kernels will tend to have
problems on newer hardware (driver issues).

Ordinarily, _also_, I keep an "installfest server" stocked with the ISOs
for commonly-requested distributions.  Therefore, ordinarily, cracked
CDs aren't really a problem.   However, as part of advance planning for
my recent residence move, I gave away the antique (and large) K6/233
tower that had been fulfilling that role, and haven't yet replaced it.
I'll probably soon do so by connecting a new-ish DVD/CD burner to the
slightly less ancient VA Linux Systems StartX MP box (still languishing
in my garage), and add a bigger HD to it.  Just not today, alas.  ;->