106 Install-Fests At Once

TrixX writes "Yesterday, a free software install-fest happened in 106 cities in 13 Latin American Countries, in a coordinated event called FLISOL (Latinamerican Free Software Install Fest). This event was coordinated by about 40 user groups. In most places, different distributions of GNU/Linux were installed, and also Free software for Windows (like OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox). At the time there is a partial count of about 1000 assistants and hundreds of computers installed, and the count is not complete yet." We mentioned this event a few weeks back; now that it's happened, I'd like to read accounts from some of the participants about their impressions of the events.

Comments

Yesterday, a free software install-fest happened..

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

Yesterday, a free software install-fest happened in 106 cities in 13 Latin American Countries, and no one in particular noticed a thing.

Really interesting.

[vidarlo]

This shows what I've been thinking for a long time... Free software has a huge potential in poor countries, that has the need for a IT system working on a old infrastructure, and in this field Linux/FLOSS plays very nice. Imagine a win2k3 server running on 5 year old hardware? No, but then imagine a GNU/Linux server, serving web pages or such? Yeah, it works!

Re:Really interesting.

[TrixX]

Our LUG server (at Cordoba, Aegentina) runs a Pentium 200 MMX, with 64MB de RAM. It serves a static apache website, a dozen mailing lists through GNU/Mailman, mail for some of us, and a big FTP site (40+60+27GB hard disks).

It's a little strained but runs fine.

At the local installfest (this time, and at previous event_ there was a wide range of hardware. Some people have an old computer (Pentium I) they don't use anymore, and come to see if they can make it useful with Linux. Some people bring a new 2Ghz+ computer and want to dual-boot with Windows XP. The rest of the people cover the middle range quite evenly.

Most computers here are custom boxes assembled from components (CPU, motherboard, HD, ...) by small computer stores here. Big computer manufacturers (Dell, Compaq, HP) ahve little presence here, and have much higher prices. There are recently some big retailers (supermarkets, like Walmart) now selling computers assembled by bigger local companies. But hardware and peripherals varies a lot; you can still find parallel port printers along with USB ones, for example.

We installed mostly Mandrake 10.1 . It's a great distro for newbies, and helps them a lot to get closer to Linux. Besides it does a quite good job detecting hardware, newer and older. It might be a litle overtaxing for smaller systems (specially with less than 128MB of RAM), so we installed a cutted down version of Debian Sarge there.

For the second time in 12 installfests (in 6 years), all participants left the event with a system with a working Linux. hardware support has improved a lot progressively. In 1999, almost 50% of the people had difficulties making it work.

Windows installfest

[KiloByte]

Crap... and what about actually stopping the perpetual Windows installfest we're having at work?

Fortunately, I'm a programmer/sysadmin and I don't even touch user support. The support guys, though, get 897984789798 calls that "your program stopped working, fix it" from customers per day. And in basically all cases, it's some random Windows machine crappied beyond all recognition.

The day all those small businesses around start getting it that, indeed, there are better, cheaper alternatives other than Windows, and we're not simply preaching some scam to get more money, I'll be a really happy camper.

Re:Yesterday, a free software install-fest happene

[FidelCatsro]

Well , i think the people in those south american countrys probably did notice..
I can not imagine many turning on there pc and going "Aye carumba .. Where is windows"

Completely Forgot

[chochos]

I checked the FLISOL page a couple of weeks ago, but I completely forgot about the event. Probably because all Mexico City sites were too far away (there were no installfests in the south of the city). And I DID have the time to go to one, maybe help with the installs. Although the real help would have been promoting it so that more people would go.

I bet there were very few people here, since no one seems to give a flying fuck about intellectual property, copyright theft, piracy, etc. and you can get a copy of Windows for $5 USD on almost any subway station.