Next year, I think we need to do a couple of things differently. 1) We don't even try to do the 6.10 release of Ubuntu, because it will by definition be too new to know if there are issues. Instead, if 6.04 is solid, we use it, which has the advantage that several of us can order bunches of official discs well in advance of the event, and collect them together ahead of time, instead of finding out after the show has started that people who have promised to bring some are unable to make it to the event due to some unforseen problem. It can happen to anyone. Last year, Chris was in an accident. This year, we had at least one person too young to be allowed on the show floor. The goal here is to have a good supply of live CDs and/or OpenCD (FOSS apps for Windows) actually in the hall before the show opens.

2) The other advantage of choosing a CD several months in advance is that we might even be able to customize it. I think we need to make sure that any Windows functionality includes in the K-meleon screen a link to an on-disk html document, and the live desktop should have an icon linking to the same document, which would include KCLUG info, such as the base http://kclug.org, and http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug URLs, to facilitate access to our available services. Adding this document in exchange for the time and expense we incur in burning CDs seems a fair bargain to me.

On 10/30/05, Leo Mauler webgiant@yahoo.com wrote:

I suggest that before choosing to use Ubuntu again, we scan the Ubuntu forums well in advance on 6.04 to see if other people have problems like the mentioned "Enterprise Volume Management System" error.

Absolutely. The key is to have something stable, whatever that is. I personally liked how Ubuntu 5.10 picked up all of my hardware automagically on this laptop. Typically, laptop hardware is less likely to be supported than desktop, so that's a good sign. I figure the 6 months after 6.04 comes out will be plenty of time to decide if it's the right choice.

I suggest that the two meetings before ITEC--to catch

the people who can only show up on a Tuesday but not Wednesday, and vice versa--be the official planning meetings for ITEC, and that anyone under 21 who wants to make CDs for ITEC make them by one of those meetings and bring them to that meeting. Chances are someone going to ITEC will be at one of those meetings.

I don't think that's early enough for planning, especially when we are talking about doing some kind of formal presentation. The planning needs to be done well ahead of then, and those last two meetings should suffice for assembling the materials for the show.

Is there a relatively cheap and/or free, preferably

OSS, application for creating those nifty autorun.exe programs for a homemade OpenCD-like CD? Seems to me

...

OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4 on it. Being able to hand out an OpenCD-like CD with OpenOffice.org 2.0 on the CD would be a lot better, especially since it would have KCLUG info on the CD.

Rather than autorun.exe, it can be an HTML document. It's trivial to put that in the autorun.inf file. There's a lot of flexibility there.