First Linux Install Fest @ WBUT

Yesterday, WBUT (wbut-lug) organized its’ 1^st LINUX Install Fest with the help of ilug-cal. This was only the first day of its 3-day venture. It was also the first of its’ kind in West Bengal . Actually wbut-lug existed for quite some time now (without much activity). But few days back some students (namely Rabi, Ankur & others) of WBUT itself said to Indra da,

“Many people have lots of problem while installing Linux…..also we can’t listen to mp3 music in Fedora etc….why not we organize a workshop for this?”.

So the obvious answer, “Why not?”. From that day preparations started. Indra da supervised the entire affair. First of all, since in WBUT we have only a 2 Mbps connection which is still not enough for around 22 computers trying to do YUM install/update, Sushmit da created a local repository for Fedora 7. Lots of credit goes to him. Handouts, Notes and flyers were also prepared. Debarshi da also brought lots of Fedora stickers.

We all (members of ilug-cal) went down to help out around 22 students gathered in the IBM Centre of Excellence at WBUT. The event was scheduled to be started on 12 noon. Though we were an hour late, it started very well. The day started with a brief but definitive introduction from Indra da. We started showing the students about how to do a Network install of Fedora 7 (ofcourse from the Local Repo). For this we also used the boot disk of F7. The CD/DVD installation is only a subset of this, so it won’t create any problems for them. Then we instructed them how to do Yum install/update. The yum installs were directed to the local repo too. Overall, they recieved a much better means compared to their home owing to the resources at WBUT. Because practically in India, very few does a Network installation.

Well now, some students brought their home CPU’s and Laptops. Others were using WBUT systems. Two of them had 64-bit box and hence installed x86_64 bit version of F7. Rest of them installed the 32-bit ones. After F7 was installed, we yum installed audio/video codecs & supports (xine, libdvd, ffmpeg etc) in all the systems. They learnt how to actually do Yum install. Then, we played music, videos and DVD’s on their systems and showed them how well is the multimedia support of Linux.

On th second half, we also yum installed some popular games like OpenArena and Torcs on all the systems. Now, games make everyone crazy. They tested them for some time. Then we also showed how to use K3B for CD/DVD burning. All of them individually tested it by burning CD’s themselves. Now, we made it clear to them that everyone was free to ask questions and we would go around to help them. As Indra da said, “He is a biggest stupid who doesn’t ask questions!!”. Some of the popular questions were:

• Why doesn’t swap partition have a mount point?
• Why doesn’t F7 play mp3 by default?
• How to mount ntfs & vfat partitions in Linux?

Problems Faced:

1. One of the box had a weird problem. It had a nVidia chipset and AMD Athlon 64-bit processor. The mouse (Type: optical Make:M$) was working but pointer was invisible “Hollow man” mouse 😉 . Anyways, Soumyadip da fixed this by adding some lines in /etc/X11/xorg.conf as given here: Invisible mouse pointer!!
   

2. Another one had ATI video driver. So he could not play OpenArena due to rendering problems (Needs to be fixed).
3. Two of the systems were miserably slow. So we couldn’t install F7 in them.

See all photos: WBUT LUG’s 1st InstallFest

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