Herewith: A few words about San Francisco Bay Area Linux "InstallFests". There are several Linux groups in the Bay Area: -- CalLUG is the U.C. Berkeley student group (http://www-callug.cs.berkeley.edu/), and holds regular meetings during the school year and sometimes during the summer. -- San Francisco PC Users Group's Linux SIG (http://www.sfpcug.org/sig/linux.html) has been a pioneer in the LUG field, but has the parent group has lost its SIG meeting space. -- Fortunately, an impromptu umbrella group, CABAL (http://hugin.imat.com/cabal/) is planning to hold meetings in the same space courtesy of the new tenant, Electric Lichen, LLC (http://electriclichen.com/), a Linux-oriented commercial firm. -- Silicon Valley Linux Users Group (http://www.svlug.org/) has become the powerhouse among Bay Area Linux groups. Eric Raymond, Linus, and Marc Andreessen as speakers in quick succession.... What more need be said? -- Bay Area Linux Users Group meets irregularly (about bimonthly) in a San Francisco Chinatown restaurant's upstairs banquet room. -- Santa Cruz Linux Users Group (http://linus.got.net/) is a new LUG. -- Community College of San Francisco LUG (http://www.ccsf.cc.ca.us/Organizations/Linux_Users_Group/) is another student-run group, meeting weekly during the school year. For quite a long time, there have been "InstallFests" held by and for Linux geekdom, both in the San Jose area and in San Francisco. They've been very popular. People are invited to come with or without machines to help them with, to either help them through installations or assist on other problems. Predictably, the term "InstallFest" has been the subject of controversy, and the most commonly-used substitute is "Workshop". However, the term persists. A key aspect of InstallFests in the past is that they've been 100% geek events. They've been held at venues known pretty much only to existing Linux hobbyists -- and motivated newcomers. This changed on April 18, when SFpcUG's Linux SIG, BALUG, and SVLUG -- coordinated by CABAL -- jointly produced a _very_ public InstallFest, at one of the huge commercial "computer swaps" put on by the Robert Austin computer-show organisation (http://www.robertaustin.com/). Such shows are attended typically by some 5000 or more members of the general computing public, and are a flea-market for PC-clone, book, and software vendors. Linux is never seen at such shows, except in a few books and a very few CD-ROM sets. It's almost entirely a Windows event. Thus, our InstallFest got to play to a totally new audience who have never heard of Linux. We had a large area allocated to us, with about eight large tables. Several of us brought Linux boxes, extra monitors/keyboards/mice/ cables, 10Base-T hubs and CAT5 cabling, distributions, spare NICs, my spare NE2000-clone PCMCIA card, my laplink cable (for PLIP), my external SCSI CD-ROM, and copious printed literature. The public was puzzled, intrigued, and interested to see us. We did fairly well, on the whole.... and we're going to do it again, on May 30, and other dates further off. A number of good ideas for advance preparation got shelved, mostly because I was running too short on sleep and time, to get them done. I offer them here, in hopes they'll prove useful to other LUGs. -- Have literature and greeting tables up-front. All literature should be for people to walk off with, because they will do so despite anything you do or say. It's what they expect. Large lettering saying "DO NOT TAKE" didn't prevent our most useful printouts from vanishing. The "greeters" at the front desks should check people in, and direct them to whatever helpers or resources are needed for them. Continue to move people off to the sides or back of the greeting area, so they don't clump in front. -- Linux is a networked OS. Make the most of it! -- Have 10base-T cables pre-wired to hubs, each marked with its uniquely assigned IP address, netmask, etc. Might as well choose one of the private IP ranges, such as class A network 10.0.0.0. Cabling that crosses the floor should be protected and fastened down with (at least) gaffer's or duct tape. -- Have a central Web/ftp server, with docs and useful info. on-hand and linked for visitors to view and use. -- Have several distributions on an ftp machine, for network installations. Very fast! -- Linux is different and exciting. Make the most of it! -- Deep-six the fvwm95. Right behind the greeting desk, you should have the eye-candy machines running Enlightenment, WindowMaker, KDE, The GIMP, networked Quake2, XBill, _anything_ that doesn't resemble all the Win95 generic stuff at adjoining tables. Make sure you have some audio-video. One of the SVLUG people has MPEG clips of South Park. (How about a Connectix QuickCam -- now Linux-supported?) -- Remember, _first you have to get their attention_. Then, you point out whatever advantages are relevant to that particular listener (_benefits_ for most people, features for the geeks). Then, deal with their objections. Then, see if they want to make an appointment for installation at the next InstallFest. (See Don Marti's "Linuxmanship" piece, at http://electriclichen.com/people/dmarti/linuxmanship.html.) -- In order to keep the exciting stuff visible up front, move geekish conversations and problems away from the greeting tables (as above). Consider having the technical problems and ongoing installations on the _back_ tables. A rather pathetically underdeveloped set of Web pages and ftp files is reachable from the CABAL site, http://hugin.imat.com/cabal/. I hope we'll make some more progress towards a "recipe" for a successful public InstallFest, and a software configuration for good central server machines. If/when we do, the material will be linked from CABAL (and we'll probably cut CDR disks of the software, to make sure we can redeploy to various machines as needed). Thoughts? Suggestions? Brickbats?