I'd like to thank everyone for the event last night: Hans for
providing the space, Richard for organizing, Daniel for serious ninja
hacker skills, Brian for doing the leg work to keep us well fed, and
all the new users who were brave enough to bring their personal
computers to a group of hackers for help. I'm looking forward to the
next Novice Night. Here's a few of my observations.
First, Novice Night is not just for novices! I've been using Debian
for 10 years and last night I learned how to make a bootable USB
memory stick which contains the squeeze Debian installer and can be
used simultaneously as storage for other types of files.
Second, since the event had a large turn out, I think the next one
could be better organized by assembling a few "hack teams" on a
specific subjects. These teams would have their own desks and one
leader from the community. For example, some of the common tasks I saw
included installing squeeze on laptops with various CPU architectures,
debugging network driver problems with debian-installer, creating
bootable media and providing advice for individuals who had problems
installing Debian prior to the event.
Third, I think the group of leaders (myself included) would do better
to become more familiar with the myriad desktop environments available
in Debian. I was asked to help troubleshoot a wifi problem but the
user had a KDE desktop and I had no idea how to use it since I've
become accustomed to Gnome and the core Debian networking
configuration files. I realized a lot of the leaders were reflexively
calling out shell commands. "apt-get install m-a" or "open etci slash
apt slash sources dot list in an editor". There were even some
beginners that did not know where their terminal application was
located, let alone how to operate the computer with bash.
Lastly, I believe the leaders would do better resisting the urge to
"drive" when a new user has a problem. One focus of getting started
with Debian is participation. Even if a leader is only dictating
instructions, it's more valuable to have the user interact with the
computer to enter those instructions. That's a hard one but I think
it's the most valuable.
Best,
Lee
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