[DC LoCo] Software Freedom Day / Takoma Park Folk Festival... Thinking ahead.

[Matthew Gallagher]

Nice UEFI  setups will  eventually make this a moot point, but  I can
attest to the fact that the older, low end machines  that
the people who would actually need help with this typically have, can
be a complete nightmare to get to boot from BIOS.

Yes, that's a terrible run on sentence, but it's late and I'm tired :p


I'd say just bring a bunch of disks, it's way easier to get someone to
grab a disk  to try out later,
then to get someone to come early and have someone mess with their flash drive.


On Fri, May 20, 2011 at 1:43 AM, Ted Smith <teddks at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 2011-05-19 at 22:27 -0400, Nicholas Wheeler wrote:
>> On Thu, May 19, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Brian Curtis <briancurtis.wx at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > most computers boot from CD nowadays, plus windows will load the autorun on
>> > the CD which will let them boot from the CD.
>> >
>> > win-win
>>
>> most computers boot from USB nowadays, plus the linux kernel will
>> autorun off the USB when it boots!
>
> Actually, I've had a lot of trouble getting non-sophisticated users to
> get computers to boot from USB. Most newer hardware can, but a lot of
> laptops have it turned off, and some buggy BIOSes that are abandonware
> from the 70s with flashy skins (e.g. every non-free BIOS) will remove
> USB drives from the boot order every time you reboot without the same
> device inserted into the same slot.
>
> Booting from USB is at about the level of requisite sophistication as
> booting from CDs in 2001. And the singularity is going to happen in
> twenty years and then all of this "save the planet" bullshit will be
> revealed as the irrelevant waste of time it is. So it seems like a
> lose-lose to toss the easy-to-use, tested system in order to please
> Mother Gaia.
>
> Fortunately, it doesn't seem like either tactic precludes the other, so
> if you want to advertise somehow to impart that people who want Ubuntu
> can get it put on a USB stick at TPFF, you can do that.
>
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-- 
-Matthew Gallagher