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The First-Ever Installfest in Egypt
"The atmosphere was just unbelievable; people who had had linux installed realised the LUGgers were overwhelmed and stayed on helping other people with installs, we couldn't burn CDs fast enough, several thousand educational pamphlets were not enough by a wide margin. We were expecting maybe 150 or 200 people throughout the day, but we had already reached that number by 9:45 a.m. (15 minutes before opening!). To the best of our knowledge, the most successful LUG-driven event in the middle-east, certainly the biggest, and one hell of a day that we'll all remember. Note that we are now looking at the possibility of another Installfest during summer at the Bibliotecha Alexandrina and would welcome any extra resources. (A big thanks to MadFarmAnimalz' family who served the volunteers sandwiches carefully wrapped in copies of the GPL preamble and the deCSS code)"
Theres a mirror of the site here
drunk chemists
I've held a couple of small-scale linux "Installfests" in the past, and the availability of CDs (and CD-Rom drives, in some cases) can certainly be an issue.
I found that many computers support Network Booting, which RedHat supports easily. While not every machine supports it, doing net installs on the machines that do frees up CD-ROM drives and CDs for the ones that don't.
vi vs emacs
Mirrored on an Internet2 site here: ta-da.
|/usr/games/fortune
Great job getting that many people out guys, thst's amazing. I'm sure you're completely wasted right now but a further description of your marketing campaign and why you think it was so effective would be a great help to LUG's around the world. Was there some cultural aspect that you used to help you out or are Egyptians just dying to get Linux installed?
http://phreakco.us/egypt/
my sig sucks, you dont want to see it....
Computers are great and all for what we use them for, but for them to be able to bring people together in a _social_ setting is pretty damn cool. Sorta throws itself in the face of the usual antisocial computer geek stereotype.
The very best part of installfests is that isntead of just complaining about Microsoft, people actually get out and do something to help provide better options.
reeddavid.com
I setup a mirror in germany at: http://www.infodb.de/linux-egypt.manalaa.net/files /big10/
According to the Linux Counter, Egypt has 2262 registered machines (with 156 registered users), or 2.26 users for every million people that live there. With a really low turnover, and half the people being actually getting linux installed, they could easily have enough people to quadruple the counter stats. Perhaps the organizers should invite people to Register.
With 3 more users, they could pass nepal.
Replying to myself; turns out navigating the site wasn't as hard as I expected; there's enough english to point the way. They posted their flyer in these places, and their text message in these places. They were very organized; their Wiki system of keeping track of where things were posted seems to have worked excellently. The success of this event should be a model for people planning other community events.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
The only problem I can think of is verifying that what's on the CD isn't malicious code. Hmmmmm... That's a tough one. Maybe a better idea would be for Linux users around the world to each donate some money to a nonprofit organization created for the purpose of Linux Installfests. That nonprofit would then have thousands of copies of Linux CDs pressed each day, at a cost of almost nothing per CD. I can see how it would be in the best interest of all Linux distro makers, and all companies that use Linux as part of their strategy (e.g., IBM) to donate a few cents from each CD they sell to this organization. This organization would then routinely ship crates of CDs to LUGs around the world, for the purpose of installing on folks' computers, and giving them the CD as their welcome gift to the Linux community. If a nonprofit can't be started, then why not donate some of those CD duplication units that can make 10 CDs at once, or at least the funds to buy those things...
By making this community grow as much as possible, we will all be doing a great thing. It is likely that companies will produce hardware drivers, application software, and other products for Linux. It is likely that by experimenting with Linux, a lot of people will become a lot smarter about computers, and the ratios of 1337 users to the idiot users (that Microsoft helped create with its talking paperclips) will be more favorable.
Finally, some other folks mentioned network boots. Yes, I think this is a good idea. But still give folks a CD so they can reinstall if they hose their system.
Actually these distros were around, but for newbies it was mandrake (hope not to get flamed for sayin so)
What the hell are you talking about? KDE and GNOME have both been translated to Arabic, and I believe Mozilla as well. Arabic font display using Xft is much nicer than on Windows were the fonts are unreadable unless seriously magnified.
On modern desktops, Arabic works just fine.
You're going to have to pull it out of cvs , I haven't bothered doing any official releases or anything yet , its just a bunch of php scripts.
It lets you gather the number of each distro , type of CPU , harware type (desktop , laptop, etc) that people want linux installed and configured for, as well as the number of people turning up to help who can handle it. And you get a nice little graph showing you how many people sign up each day before the event.
There's another installfest project on sourceforge here
The Sawy Cultural Center is new and the management there was really supportive. We at the LUG feel we can do a lot of work with their support, and one way to get them enthusiastic about linux and open source is for them to feel the power of the open source community. We showed them that day how many people we could pull in, and I'm getting their admin to look at their server stats today ( ; hit it hard people).
:)
If you want to help us, e-mail Khaled Mohsen who was our liason there and just tell him that you as a linux user and/or open source proponent would like to thank him for helping out the Egyptian Linux Users' Group, and make sure to extend the thanks to Mr. Mohamed Al Sawy too through Khaled.
Show me the power of slashdot
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Interesting comment, as someone whose actually studied the shariah (though of course not gone nearly as deep as one may) and for whom Islamic studies was my mainstay before entering the IT world (I still consider it the most important thing out there, and paramount to my life, though I have to confess to dedicating an obscene amount of time to my current passion, after all it is my living). I myself have wondered about how close GPL-like thought can come into with traditional Islamic iqtisadi (roughly economic) thought. As you may konw many of the scholars (with some prominent exceptions) have rejected the concept of intellectual property, coupled with the fact that hoarding is considered a heinous sin. The idea of distributing source for the public benifit certainly seems in tune with the general Islamic ethos, though I don't know if I'd say that cancels out all closed models of software development as well (Allahu 'alam). I have given thought to the notion that Linux and other free systems is just what the Muslim nations could use right now to help bring back some of the intellectual heritage and scientific innovation that had been a hallmark in former times (not that it's dead by any means, just looks at Safawid and post Safawid metaphysics in Iran to disprove the idea that Islamic philosophy died with Ibn Rushd.) Certainly a system that Muslims can actively contribute to and make their own would be much better than just sending in checks to a closed business located in Redmond. wa salaam 'ala 'l-muhtadeen...
Would this be the Egyptian god that new users pray to?
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
You obviously haven't been to the middle east. If anything it's more the opposite -- the only contact some parts of the middle east have with western culture is through the pervasiveness of American crap.
I mean, if all that you saw of the west was Duncan Donuts, Levi's, Ford, Microsoft, Chevron and CNN -- found in American style malls around American style highways full of American cars -- you'd probably not be terribly fond of it. Some of the more insulated countries (I spent a little while in Saudi Arabia recently) are commercially very American, but there's very limited contact between normal people and westerners.
There's much more American junk in the Middle East than you find in Western Europe.