To those who are reading this as a result of picking up a flier: Welcome! If you did not sign up on our mailing list at the fair, please feel free to do so now by following the “Listserv” link on the right. Also, If you ever have time to come to lunch on Wednesdays (noon to 1PM) please come back and check the “Lunch Meetings” section on the right.

Here is a picture of the merry group:

• 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.

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:

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.

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!