Onward

Whew.

Three weeks, three meetings/installfests, approximately 300 people at the three events (as well as those who stopped by the office between events “just to see what this is about”) and 28 installs — by my count, and that’s not counting those who took home Live CDs and tried them out without reporting back — and with Felton Linux Users Group in the starting blocks, the Lindependence 2008 event in Felton is in the proverbial record books.

The end of this event signals the sowing of the seeds of digital freedom in this community, spurred by the knowledge that people here have a choice in their computing lives. What’s left is to report later on what the harvest brings.

Of the 28 installs, only two have gone awry: One in which the user futzed with his grub and made his machine unbootable, and the other a case where too many cooks spoiled the broth, and a reinstall — if this user so desires — is in the works.

As I mentioned earlier this month, we decided after the first meeting/installfest to forgo the Microsoft-free week that we had originally planned. The reason is simple: So many people decided to go Microsoft-free for good — and we’re monitoring their progress and setbacks — that this part of the equation became unnecessary. It was like landing on a jump-forward-two-squares space in a board game, or on a very tall ladder in Chutes and Ladders. It’s a space that none of us, least of all me, expected to land on, and be in a position to move forward this quickly.

Of course, this is the kind of unexpected news we need.

In the upcoming manual, the Microsoft-free week will be optional; if Felton is any indication of what is in store for future Lindependence events, what is clear is that people are past the point of comparing Windows and GNU/Linux side-by-side. They are ready to give Microsoft their walking papers.

My apologies for not getting to this blog sooner. Catching up with the rest of my life after the last meeting took up a significant amount of time; the rest of the time was take up with preparation for the next step in this project. We have gotten requests for the “how-to manual” for Lindependence from at least two different communities — Boulder Creek, California (just six miles up Highway 9 from here) and from a community south of Portland, where a former Felton resident now in Oregon heard about what we were doing and thought it would be a good idea to do the same thing in his community.

In the next few days, we’ll be hashing out what went wrong and what went right, and those discussions and observations will appear here. In the meantime, this office is a holy mess that needs cleaning and I have some work — testing dbEntrance and some networking jobs that I have postponed — to get done.

But in the meantime, Lindependence moves onward.

71 and gloriously sunny on what summer days ought to be.

Random thoughts and bon mots

[With apologies to the San Francisco Chronicle columnist Scott Ostler, who often starts off an occasional sports column with "Random thoughts, cheap shots and bon mots." I'm leaving out the cheap shots.]

So while we gear up for Saturday’s out-of-the-starting-blocks finale, I thought I would catch up on things I haven’t caught up on (yet), and to give you a couple of random thoughts about how things are going and where they are heading.

Incidentally, I said both “out of the starting blocks” and “finale” above for a reason: As far as the events for Lindependence in Felton go, Saturday’s event might be Lindependence’s last event before the formation of a LUG and an on-the-ground GNU/Linux presence in the area, but the spirit of Lindependence and movement itself are currently snowballing into something that will be felt in these parts, and happening at a rate faster than I had expected.

First things first: A lot of people made this happen so far, and are making it happen as we go forward. Someday soon I’ll get to all of them. Locally in Felton, Bob Lewis and John Detke have been invaluable with their guidance, having lived here a lot longer than I have. David Eisenberg and Jim Griffin, college professors at different schools, also lent a huge hand. Daniel Gimpelevich, Sean Kellog, Grant Bowman, Rolf Pedersen, Jeremy Sturdivant and Kai Tamkun all represented their distros of choice, and then some. Same for Steve Rufle, who came up from Phoenix for this, GPLed stuffed penguins in tow. Frank Turner made name tags, posters and signage which are so nice, I finally have something to put on the walls here in the office when we’re not using them in Lindependence events. Christian Einfeldt not only took miles of videotaped footage, but also helped on in an install or two.

Gurus and greybeards, all. And if I haven’t mentioned you, I will. I promise.

Fedora, Mandriva, Ubuntu, Debian – those are the big distros on hand here, and we’d like to add more. A special mention to two outstanding distros that couldn’t be here, but support us as well: Wolvix, straight out of Norway, is a Slackware based distro, and lead developer Wolven is a new Dad (congratulations) and offered his support for Lindependence 2008 when first asked; the other distro, AntiX, is a great distro based on Mepis for older machines, and like Wolven, lead developer anticapitalista also gave us a nod early on. Both these guys couldn’t be here, and both do not (yet) have communities large enough for someone to come up and participate. But as the project goes to other areas, there will be other chances.

Developers stepped up as well. I haven’t said enough about Codeweavers during the course of their support, and I am grateful they are around. Codeweavers allowed us to provide those who convert to Linux to be able to use their software so the newbies can use their Windows software on Linux. OpenOffice.org also gets special mention, not only because they are a more-than-viable option to Microsoft Office (even on other platforms), but they gave the project a significant boost in their community. On several occasions, I got calls from people who said, “I saw Lindependence on an OpenOffice forum . . . .” Tod Landis of dbEntrance, from just up the road in Boulder Creek, was on hand with his outstanding MySQL browser. On the hardware side, Zareason always deserves special mention for providing such great machines that are Microsoft-free, and even newcomer Sustain Computing gets a nod for supporting our efforts*-.

As for Lindependence, we’re moving northward. I got a call this morning from someone (other than Tod) who wants to organize the same kind of events in Boulder Creek, a small town about 6 miles north of here on Highway 9; the last town between here and the summit (and over the summit in question lies the valley — the Silicon Valley). Not only this, as I mentioned in an earlier blog, we may be on the road to Portland shortly, bringing Lindependence to a town near that Oregon city.

So far, I have come away with several interesting realizations, the more important of which are these: That people are more ready and willing to distance themselves from Microsoft than I had originally anticipated, and translating that into getting them to use Free/Open Source Software will have a huge effect on the digital landscape in this area and elsewhere — and let me emphasize the elsewhere because if it can happen here, it can happen elsewhere.

So who’s ready to make history in their community?

Oh, and if you have Microsoft stock, I’d sell. Fast.

[Okay, so maybe I threw in a cheap shot after all.]

77 and gloriously sunny.

Items of interest

Friday, as in yesterday, didn’t warrant a blog entry because essentially nothing happened. There was a lot of “housekeeping” matters to attend to, but nothing worth mentioning on a day that was filled with non-Lindependence errands more than anything. The evening ended, however, with an installfest at Cabrillo College, one of the third-Friday-of-the-month summer installfests at the college (the next one August 15 — make a note of it for those of you in the area), where Lindependence guru Jeremy Sturdivant brought his Nintendo DS running DS Linux, which is pretty cool in a PDA sort of way.

What sort of piqued my interest yesterday while catching up on my reading, digital and otherwise, was a couple of items. The first was Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols blog item which makes a great case for using GNU/Linux during the current economic downturn. It says, for the most part, that with the economy in a tailspin, we can no longer afford the “Microsoft tax” and the other surcharges that surround it (like, oh, for example, anti-virus software). A good read, and I agree with it wholeheartedly.

That definitely translated into something Feltoners should know. Thanks, Steven.

The second was a little more philosophical, but nonetheless significantly relevant. In a response to Thomas King’s article at Linux.com, a poster who goes by the name of “anonymous” writes in the last response (at least the last one on Saturday afternoon) that with installfests being on the wane, Lindependence may spark a renaissance in installfests. But rather than being “geekfests” (my word, not his or hers), these new installfests — installfest 2.0, if you will — are more geared to the non-geek general public seeking digital alternatives.

Hopefully, we are well on the way on the road to this installfest rebirth that is open and welcoming to everyone, not just the digitally inclined.

Also, Christian Einfeldt is cranking out the video — and he has more raw footage to view if you so desire. It starts here, and again this is raw video footage with which to make something a little more . . . documentary-like. With mad scientist hair, I take to the Felton Farmers Market to hand out fliers, and it’s worth a look (and Ken thinks this way, but you decide: Do I really look like Cheech Marin?).

70 degrees on a great day with only a few clouds.