heeed

It is now twenty minutes past four in the afternoon on Saturday the third of July.

The others have gone to Jon Spriggs’s talk about his event management system, Campfire Manager and as I sit in a booth typing this I am listening to a presentation given by what appears to be the next Del Boy on how to set up your own business and avoid any pitfalls. This time next year I’ll be a millionaire. Perhaps.

The days activities started after I dropped Mrs Heeed and Master Heeed off at Blackpool Tower to spend the day with friends and drove down to the Pleasure Beach.

Slight Panic…Which carpark was the cheap parking in? The BarCamp Blackpool website was consulted which gladly told me that yes, parking was cheaper for attendees but didn’t know where.

Random chance time…I slowly drove up to the car park at the Pleasure Beach and asked the attendant if this was the BarCamp expecting to get a strange look and told to go away but my guess was correct. Woop, Three quid for a days parking in Blackpool..bargain.

Car was squeezed into a spot, bag and laptop grabbed and I joined the crowds heading towards the Pleasure Beach.  Again I was lost until reception felt sorry for me and helpfully pointed me in the direction of the stairs and up I went to the BarCamp.

After being struck off the register and receiving my pie token the main room was entered just in time to hear the last of the opening address.

I had a quick look for Les Pounder and saw him sat with the rest of the Ubuntu install team: Tony Hughes, Rob McLellan and Rick Vause from Blackpool LUG . It was quite easy to spot them as one only had to look for the stylishly brown Ubuntu Guru t-shirts they were wearing.

After greetings were exchanged the team retired back to the Ubuntu Install Operations Center cunningly disguised as a seating booth.

Les had thoughtfully bought his O2 Joggler along to allow other people to drool and desire the thing.  The Joggler was busy showing a little Ubuntu presentation that Les had put together. The choice of background music was interesting to say the least and after a few hours repetition everyone was looking to throw the thing quite far in the direction of away.

After updating Les’s HTC Hero to 2.1, I set up an ancient Thinkpad 380ed running Damn Small Linux and left it to see if anyone would notice. The 380ed was part of a batch of laptops that were obsolete back in 2001 when I got my hands on them and it was fun getting the system installed.

Problem Laptops….

The morning passed quite smoothly with install and problems being sorted out until the problem laptop turned up. I suppose that every install event gets one that turns up.

It started quite innocently:

Owner: Hi, Can you put Ubuntu on my laptop so I can dual boot

Guru: Yes, should only take about half an hour

Owner: Cool, Lets Do it

Many hours later:

Guru: Finished

The original install had been performed from a USB stick and somehow had gone wrong enough that booting ended up with a flashing login terminal cursor and not the expected login screen. The desktop was started and the problem was looked into only to find that the Broadcom BCM4312 wireless chipset was also not working and DBus seemed not to be working.

After a while of head scratching and tinkering a successful fresh install from CD was performed and, after being told off by Alistair the network man  for cheekily using a Ethernet connection to run an update requiring 130mb of packages, a 3G Dongle router was used to update the system and install the wifi chipset firmware allowing a owner to get his laptop back. Sorry Jack.

During this adventure it was announced that the Pie Wagon had turned up. Ever the professionals the entire team  stayed to finish the job and definitively did not go for Pie and Peas!

The Outlaw cometh at high noon…..just in time for lunch!

Dan Lynch, presenter of Linux Outlaws, showed up during lunch and after apparently being taught to swear in sign language dropped by the booth to say hello.

Somehow this then developed into what appeared to be a mini BarCamp within a BarCamp with everyone quick-drawing their phones and comparing them. To show off something on his posh N900, Dan tried to run a little dart scoring app he had written.

Unfortunately the N900 decided not to play and had to be restarted with Dan muttering that it had been working fine shortly before. As a regular listener to the live recording of the Linux Outlaws podcast this felt quite familiar.

Before long the closing presentation had finished, Goodbyes were exchanged, BarCamp rock was grabbed and it was time to find out if any seagulls had left any presents for me on my car.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 7th, 2010 at 8:34 pm and is filed under Linux Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.