You asked for it, so we’re doing it. After some great discussion on the mailing list, folks decided it would be nice to have an installfest so we could cover some basic issues that arise when installing Linux. It’s been a while since we last held one, so it was agreed to do one now. Here’s what you need to know:

• Date: Friday, March 28, 2008
• Time: 6:00 PM - ??
• Location: 122 Nichols Hall

What you should bring:

• Your PC or laptop (or Mac). If you like, you can leave your monitor at home. We can provide one for you.
• An install CD/DVD of the distro you want to try out. A limited number of Ubuntu CDs will be available for those who want to try it. If you don’t already have a CD and want something else besides Ubuntu, bring a blank CD and we’ll help you burn an ISO.

What you should do before coming:

• Backup any and all important data on your machine.  (See Disclaimer below)
• Learn what hardware you have installed on your machine. This will be important should you have to choose kernel modules for drivers later on.
• If you want to dual-boot, defrag your harddrive multiple times so the partition you will be shrinking is as clean as possible.

If enough people are interested, we’ll pass the hat and order some pizza. The event will run as long as people are still participating.

Come and be prepared to have fun and learn something in the process.

Disclaimer: K-SLUG, K-State, and event helpers may not be held responsible for any data loss or hardware failures incurred by your experimentation. The possibility of such is very limited, but still exists. Computers are imperfect machines, as are people and software.

Print and share the poster.

Once again members of K-SLUG attended the Activities carnival in the Student Union. We handed out 10 Ubuntu CDs and talked to numerous people. Hopefully we will see a few new faces at the next lunch!

We also had some fun tweaking our display systems for maximum eye candy. There were even a few rounds of Frets on Fire.

The fall Activities Carnival was held from 6:30-8:00pm in the Union today. Our table was in the second floor hall. We had an iMac (on loan from the computer store), a tablet and two laptops running Ubuntu with various window manager setups. The infamous tux chair also made another appearance. We were in a higher traffic area this year and handed out about 30 Ubuntu live CDs and had some great conversations about Linux.

Jason decided to give Tux a try:

Friday March 9th, K-Slug along with ACM is proud to present Late Night At Nichols. The fragging will begin at 7:00pm in rooms 122 and 127 of Nichols Hall. Unlike previous semesters, a Halo 2 tournament is going to be held in one of the two rooms, along with Guitar Hero like always. Projectors will be in both rooms to provide for console gaming alongside the PC gaming that always goes on. Hope to see you there!

This last saturday, K-Slug held it’s first ever Hacker Saturday. You might be asking, what’s that? Well, it’s a time to get together and work on side projects that many of us have as well as solve Linux related problems. Most of us don’t get around to working on our side projects and they tend of slide out of existence. The idea behind Hacker Saturday was to provide an opportunity to get together with friends to work and get help on our projects.

We met at the Bluestem Bistro and set our laptops up. For this being a Linux Users Group, there sure seemed to be a lot of Apple hardware present. We even heard one girl say, “Wow, look at all the Macs in there.” But MacOS X being built on a Unix base, plus just being a good OS, makes it acceptable to us (execpt Toebee). We ended up having about 6 to 8 people show up, with two ACM guys stopping by too. Once we were setup, we worked on projects from 17:00 to 20:00. Most of the work, was tweaking installs and getting eye-candy like XGL and OS X’s quake-like terminal running. As far as actual projects go, there were plans made to revive the web based CourseScheduler killer, which I would really like to see get finished.

All-in-all it was a great time and Bluestem Bistro had some great food too. K-Slug has the same room reserved next Saturday from 17:00 to 20:00, so come out if you want to work on a project or if you have any Linux problems that need solving.

Tonight, from 6:30 to 8:00, k-slug will be manning a table at the Activities Carinval, on either the first and sceond floor of the Student Union. We hope to attract new members and spread the word on Linux.

We will have flyers and distros to hand out. We are also setting up a couple of demos to attract people. These include, a machine running XGL, which is a fully 3D openGL desktop that has some really awesome eye-candy that you need to come see for yourself; a laptop playing Star Wars: A New Hope, and not just regular Star Wars, but Star Wars being outputed via aalib, which displays video in ASCII; and lastly we are going to have an Xbox running Linux to show that Linux can be run on a variety of systems.

So stop by our table, pick up a flyer and distro and find out what’s it like to use a computer without Windows!

March 31st, k-slug, ACM, and MIS Club joined together to host the biggest LAN party held on the k-state campus. Official count was 53 computers, eclipsing any previous LAN party. The pwning took place in Nichols 122, as usual. It was a really fun time which lasted in to the wee hours of the night. With the large number of people, there were several subgames going on at all times. Mainly, Quake III, Unreal Tournament 2004, Warcraft III, Counter-Strike Source, and Enemy Territory, were played with a few smaller games of WoW and what-not being played.

We had a couple of machines setup demoing Linux as well as distros available for attendees to take at their leisure. There were plenty of Linux machines present, showing the that Linux has got game, and of course Windows machines and even some Apple hardware was present also. Thanks to Seth, a dedicated server with an Athlon X2 3800+ and 2GB of Ram, running Gentoo of course, powered all the pwnage. Thanks also to kuffs and Jesse for admining said server and running the party.

There was quite a variety of people present, including a group of gamers from Salina and even the police. With the recent theft from some of the computer labs in Nichols, all rooms are supposed to be closed by midnight and security wasn’t informed of the LAN, so they stopped by, but that didn’t stop us from tearing any n00bs a new one.

ACM took some pics of Late Night at Nichols which Brent has hosted over here, where you can clearly see how awesome the LAN party was. Travis Bradshaw brought a PS2 and Guitar Hero, which was hooked up to the projector in N122. So besides all the pc gaming, there was Guitar Hero going to whole time. MIS club had a raffle drawing for some good prizes, including an external 100GB hard drive and a Razor Diamondback gaming mouse!

All in all, it was a great LAN party and k-slug as well as Linux machines, had a great showing and we are looking forward to having another this fall semester!

The installfast was great fun for the 10 or so people who showed up. We had five installs: two ubuntu, two gentoo, and one Fedora Core 4. We also managed to get a new member involved (welcome, Matt). Hoozh took a bunch of photos and posted them online.

Things got a little tricky midway through when the Internet connection went down due to a failure from K-State’s internet provider. Luckily, between CDs and local mirrors, most were able to give their “new” distros a decent test drive.

At one point, attendees got a sneak peek at the CIS server room so our CIS members could show off their “primo” cabling job.

All in all the installfest was pretty good for our first one because in-person contact is a nice change from e-mail and IRC. It was also good to see at least one new face. Let’s hope the next one will draw an even bigger crowd and we can try a greater variety of distros (anybody cowboy enough for slackware around here?).

Linux is all about choice, and there is a huge number of distros to be tried out there. That’s what an InstallFest is for: trying out new things and getting abetter look at your choices. See you next time!

K-Slug held its first event of the 2005 fall semester and its first event in awhile for that matter on Saturday, October 1st , 2005. “Tweak Night”, was a success in that we had approximately 20 people show up and most of them brought a computer. It wasn’t a raging success or anything but at least it was an event to get the ball rolling with K-Slug.

It was a good time for members just to hang out and talk about everything Linux and to check out other people rigs and to see what they were doing with Linux. Andy Ruder stole the showing everyone how you can play Star Wars through AA-lib.