Greetings! Thank you for your interest in participating in the upcoming NBLUG InstallFest. Please read this page very carefully. It helps to outline what you need to do to prepare for the InstallFest in order to have a good experience and to help you be successful in getting Linux running on your computer.
The North Bay Linux Users Group and it's volunteers WILL NOT be responsible for any data loss that may occur on your computer. If you have data that is valuable to you, please take the required precautions (ie, backup). While a NBLUG volunteer would never intentionally damage your data, sometimes unforeseen things can happen (as you all know) when installing a new operating system onto a machine.
The minimum system requirements NBLUG supports are a 200MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM and 1GB of free disk space. Obviously, we'd encourage you to install Linux on something with a bit more power (as the quality of your experience can vary greatly depending on your hardware). If you have less than 256MB of RAM your choice of what flavor of linux to install and what applications you can use will be very limited. If the space on your hard drive is not on a separate, blank partition, please be sure to defragment your hard drive before powering it down to bring to the InstallFest.
You should check to make sure the hardware you'd like to bring, is supported by Linux. Here are a few good places to check:
Items to bring with you
- Hardware Documentation (motherboard, video card etc)
- Monitor
- Keyboard
- Mouse
- Headphones (not speakers)
- 2 or 3 floppies if your BIOS cannot boot from a CD-ROM.
Things we can help you do
- Install RedHat, Debian, SuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva.
- Install Linux on a Mac with either a pre-partioned drive, or a separate, blank, hard drive. You will need to bring your own media, and you need to make sure your Mac meets requirements of the distribution you'd like to install.
- Install Linux on a laptop. You need to have either a floppy drive or a bootable CD drive. The laptop must also be listed in the Linux Laptop Page.
- Configure PPP. You will need to bring your modem information, and information on your dial-up account (ie, username, password, DNS settings etc)
- Configure Ethernet (for example, to use with DSL, cable modem, etc). You will need to bring your account information (ie, IP Address, username etc)
- Configure X Windows. You need to make sure your card is in the list of compatible video cards.
Things we can NOT help you with
- We won't fix hardware issues you may have. If asked, we can point you to several local service companies who may be able to help you.
- Won't help you install "old anything". This includes old Linux distributions. NBLUG considers old, anything released more than 12 months ago.
- Install anything that is not on hardware compatibility list.
- Install servers. This includes (but is not limited to) any piece of software with the word server in it (ie, web server, mail server, database server etc). A sample list of applications that fall into this category would include Apache, sendmail, MySQL etc.
- Help install support for with hardware that isn't on-site (ie, printers).
- Help fix problems with an installation that wasn't originally installed by NBLUG (except by replacing the troubled install with new one)
- We do not provide application "training"
