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.
