[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu

[A'fish'ionado]

> ANY, livecd distro is going to be slow, unless you can load the CD into
> a ramdisk or something like the knoppix option "toram" (you'll need
> around a gig of mem).
> If you want a livecd that works, I would say just use knoppix.



Compared to a Knoppix live CD, the Ubuntu live CD seems really slow. Booting
takes like five minutes. I'm worried because the live CD is the first thing
the uninitiated will see when I give them the CDs, and it seems horrible to
me, and I don't want people getting a bad first impression of Linux.
(Unfortunately, I don't have a that many extry Knoppix CDs to hand out.) I
need to see if I can find a boot option to bypass the initial curses
screens; for some reason, that stage of the boot process took forever.

That, and I don't see an easy way to make a boot floppy with it. I'm not
looking forward to trying to explain to everyone how to change their BIOS
settings to boot from CD. (Maybe it's just me, but I've never encountered a
computer that was factory-set to boot from CD--I always have to change it
manually.) The intarweb recommends using Smart BootManager, but installing
it to a floppy doesn't look really newbie-friendly, either. Maybe I'll need
to pre-install it to a bunch of floppies and hand those out, too. :-P

Anyway, here's my exact situation: For speech class, I was supposed to give
a persuasive speech, and I picked "Why you Should use Linux" for my topic (I
don't think there *is* a better topic, hehe), and gave my speech (which
turned out pretty well!). I ordered forty Ubuntu CD sets, hoping to give
them out with my speech. In practice, they arrived a day late, so I'm
planning to give them out next week (maybe that'll give my argument time to
sink in). I'd hoped people would be able to just plug in the live CDs and
go, but I'm getting less and less convinced that it will work that way.

Ideally, I would get a bunch of people to play with the live CDs, get
interested, and be able to point them at the next installfest and get us
MORE CONVERTS!!! MUAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Sorry, I lost it there for a second. :-)

I've been having trouble lately making it to the meetings regularly, but if
I can make it I'll be happy to bring whatever I have left over. I only have
forty sets, and there's thirty-odd people in the class, so I don't know if
I'll have much left, though.

William Tracy
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