[kwlug-disc] KWLUG and Voip

[unsolicited at swiz.ca]

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:25:23 -0500, Joe Wennechuk
<youcanreachmehere at hotmail.com> wrote:
> As a kind of side to this ...
>  
> I would like to see more hands on type presentations. When I was at
school
> the teacher would guide us step by step through an example. We would
follow
> along actually doing what he was doing. It may be hard for us to do this
> due to all of the flavors and distros, but it is a thought. I really
learn
> better this way. If prior to the presentation; we wer informed, ... in
> order to follow along you must have your system at such, and such state,
> and configuration etc...

This has been discussed before, but is probably worth discussing again.

A few things have changed since the last time I remember discussing it.
- vm's all but 'standard' now, including appliances.
- much greater prevalence of laptops / netbooks out there.
- livecd's now much more prevalent
- internet availability at meetings.

In the past, the idea of having people haul in their systems, monitors,
keyboards, hasn't seemed, or been, viable.

Even today, with the prevalence of netbooks and laptops, few bring them.
Perhaps this is chicken and egg.

We could create a standard vm / live cd, to form a basis upon which a
presenter could leverage. Especially if they had it loaded on their laptop
beforehand. Even just a blank vm with .iso loading capability. People could
live with a CentOS/Fedora or (k)Ubuntu/Debian vm/livecd for an hour or two.

There would be the problem of dynamically distributing a 700MB file or CD
to multiple people in time for the first presentation. If a half dozen cd's
were pressed, perhaps they could be used and passed around at a meeting.

This doesn't get around the problem of not getting something like a
zoneminder or fusionpbx live cd until the start of a meeting or a
presentation.

If we are moving towards multiple, shorter, presentations, workshopping
seems even less viable.

Too bad kwlug doesn't have a bank of virtual hosts everyone could vnc into
at a meeting. (-:


P.S. Thank you John - your ZoneMinder presentation has led me to a LiveCD,
which I expect to demo tonight.