Ubuntu Wiki

This is the team planning page for those who are making the first SupportSaturday come alive: the "Ubuntu Vancouver Support Heroes". Please add your notes and information. In general, it's better to add comments and information that clarify what's already here.

This page can be a template for future SupportSaturdays, if we make it detailed!

Our first SupportSaturday will run under the theme Install, Upgrade, and Tweak-Fest II. It is scheduled for Dec. 5th 9am - 3pm. (The first hour will be for set-up. The venue will open to the public at 10am. Support activities need to be concluded by 2:30pm to allow tear-down and clean up.)

Venue

The venue location is Room 219G in Building B of the VCC Broadway Campus (1155 East Broadway). Building B is the brand new building on campus that faces the north parking lot (on 7th). For those who drive to the campus and park in the lot, just walk through the front entrance and go past the Bookstore and elevators to the back end of the building. 219G is just to the left.

For those who enter the campus from Broadway, please walk all the way to Building B and go to the ground floor of the building. Turn to the back of the building and find 219G.

The VCC website has a map of the campus location: http://www.vcc.ca/about-vcc/contact-us.cfm

The room is a classroom with an U-shaped table setup. The size is 9m x 6m (roughly estimated!). It has:

• chairs for min. 20 people,
• around 9 to 10 tables (each big enough for 4 chairs and a workstation),
• an LCD projector with a screen (~1.5sqm),
• 2x2 power points are on the left and right side of the room in a distance of ~2m,
• One ethernet RJ-45 wall plug (Kim has tested and reports live Internet connection.). The room is reported to have wireless internet access using a captive portal. Randall and Stefan have the account info. One option would be to bring a computer with two network interfaces and establish wired/wireless routing.
• one desk (is that including the tables?), whiteboards, corkboard
• TODO: Stefan, can you add a sketch of the room and locations of things here? That will help with the count of the cords, cables. Also we should map out how we want to reconfigure the room.

ToDo

• find volunteers
• create signs and flyers
• marketing: meetup postings, buzz on mailing lists, word of mouth, direct search for people having issues in Vancouver (use Google, Launchpad, Ubuntu forums)
• scratch order of events (checklist/flight-check)
• prepare an Ubuntu 9.10 mirror and a PXE (network installation) for all 9.10 flavours (Not as much fun but much easier to install from CD. KK) ... are we going to support all flavours, or should we focus on the "standard Ubuntu" to keep our support cases simple(r)?
• gather needed equipment (identify who will supply) We may be able to borrow some from Free Geek.

• figure out "lessons learned" from Windowless Wednesdays, and use that info to make SupportSaturdays stronger

Equipment List

• Please initial each item you will bring and indicate quantity.

• (qty) laptops (to look things up, to compare, to submit bug reports etc.)
• (qty) network switch, number of ports
• (qty) network cables (lengths)
• (qty) screens/monitors (for those that bring in desktops/towers) (optional)
• (qty) keyboards (for those that bring in desktops/towers) (optional)
• (qty) mice (for those that bring in desktops/towers) (optional)
• (qty) power bars
• (qty) extension cords
• (qty) (capacity GB) external USB drive (Something to back up peoples' data before hacking at them.)
• (qty) (capacity GB) external firewire drive (Something to back up peoples' data before hacking at them.)
• (qty) (capacity GB) external SATA drive (Something to back up peoples' data before hacking at them.)
• (qty) Ubuntu Server running: NFS, Samba, FTP, and DNS (for repository redirection) services with (size GB) hard drive
• (further discussion needed) Router, or Ubuntu machine to act as router.
• (qty) extra USB wireless dongles (in case built-in wifi doesn't work for people)

• Question for Kim: Can we leverage our O'Reilly relationship and get review (free/cheap) copies of "The Official Ubuntu Book"?

Materials List

• Please initial each item you will bring and indicate quantity.

• (qty) 9.10 Karmic Koala install CD's (to do live-boot testing)
• (qty) colour dry-erase markers for the white board
• (qty) masking tape (for labeling people's equipment)
• (qty) pens (for labeling people's equipment)
• (qty) "Powered by Ubuntu" stickers
• (qty) sign-in sheet on clipboard, so we know who came, and can follow-up if necessary
• A short guide to "getting started with Ubuntu" as a take-away. A few pages of tips printed for easy reference, especially where to get help afterward (i.e. Launchpad, not Google!)... teaching people "How to Fish."

Questions to Ask "Helpees"

• these are in the meetup.com RSVP questions. We can also do a more detailed survey if necessary . We can (and should) also follow-up directly by email where applicable). If you follow-up, please inform the group so we're not 'peppering' the same person with questions.
  

1. Are you coming for assistance? If so, please tell us briefly what services you need.
2. Please tell us about your computer. What hardware is it? (Make, model, RAM, CPU, disk space)
3. Are you currently running Ubuntu on this hardware? If so, which version?
4. Do you have a recent backup of your personal data? (If not, we highly recommend that you copy all data to an eternal disk. If you need help doing this, please let us know here)
5. Please specify your email address. This will only be used if we need to gather more information in order to prepare to help you.

Dress Rehearsal

There will be a "dress rehearsal" on Thursday Dec 3rd at 6:00pm, regular meeting place. We'll use that time to test the plan, the equipment, and to ensure we haven't forgot anything.

Participants

Event Marketing

We have essentially three things going on at the session: 1) A support/install event (the focus) 2) One-on-one demos 3) A slide-show, with light presentation material

Our marketing should consist of poster(s), web postings, and emails.

The first thrust will be to get as many people as possible in the Ubuntu Vancouver Loco signed up for the event (in the spirit of fixing our own group and making it stronger so we can help more people at future events). Randall will email the group at least 3-4 times to encourage everyone to come and get their issues fixed. Scheduled mailings: 11/24, 11/25, 11/26.
** update 11/26/2009: Low RSVP rate inside the LoCo. Only 4 people RSVP'd with requests for help/installs. We should likely open the install/support event to the public after 11am. (This will give internal support requests a head-start, and priority.

Once we've got our own group signed up, we'll begin the marketing thrust to the public.

Ubuntu: The world's most popular free operating system. In a word: Amazing! Ubuntu Vancouver cordially invites you to a public support session. Skilled Ubuntu enthusiasts will be on hand to answer questions, demonstrate Ubuntu's diverse capabilities, help you install it, fix issues, and to upgrade to the latest version of Ubuntu: 9.10 Karmic Koala.

Got issues? Bring your computer. We'll do the rest. Just want a demo? Bring yourself! We'll show you Ubuntu's magic.

** This event is FREE, just like Ubuntu. Donations are gladly accepted, if you feel the urge.**

Here is the <proposed> text that will appear regarding the demos/presentation:

Ubuntu: The world's most popular free operating system. In a word: Amazing! Ubuntu Vancouver cordially invites you to information session and demonstration about Ubuntu! Skilled Ubuntu enthusiasts will be on hand to answer questions and to demonstrate Ubuntu's diverse capabilities.

Plan to drop in! We'll show you Ubuntu's magic.

** This event is FREE, just like Ubuntu. Donations are gladly accepted, if you feel the urge.**

Incoming Support Issues

Goal: Help as many people as possible with the highest quality possible. Avoid "try-this-try-that" method of troubleshooting on-site, to maintain credibility.

Terminology:<<BR>> "Support Hero": A volunteer who is attending the event to offer assistance, or has been part of the planning process.
Requestor: A person that has RSVP'd "yes" for the event and has indicated that they need assistance.

Suggested Help Procedure (pre-event):
1) "Support Hero" reaches out to Requestor via email, acknowledging the request and asking the Requestor to quickly scan a list of bug reports, if applicable.
2) Requestor responds with more info. This could be a bug number, or more descriptive information about the issue.
3) "Support Hero" asks Requestor if s/he would be comfortable filing a Launchpad Question. If so, Requestor submits question to: If so, skip to step 5. If not, skip to step 4 below.
4) "Support Hero" submits a Launchpad Question describing the issue on Requestor's behalf.
5) "Support Hero" monitors Launchpad responses to question, and conducts further research.

This is a collection of the RSVP responses from people who are coming for specific help:

Issue #1:

“Only issue since my jump to Karmic is getting gnome-pilot and jpilot (PalmOS) back to syncing...since the upgrade it seems to be broken.”
Lenovo T400 laptop, 3GB RAM, Intel Core2Duo 2.53 GHz, 320 GB drive, dual-booting w/ WinXP ”
Are you currently running Ubuntu on this hardware? If so, which version? “Yes - recently upgraded from Jaunty to Karmic (plain-vanilla Ubu)”
Do you have a recent backup of your personal data? (If not, we highly recommend that you copy all data to an eternal disk. If you need help doing this, please let us know here)
“Yes, I have sbackup set up to do this automatically, and routinely copy the auto-backups off to a home network drive. ”

Issue 2:

Description: “fix up sound on laptop after karmic update; get grub to work again after windows partition reinstall on my desktop”
“laptop: hp elitebook 2530p desktop: 1gb ram; Intel Core 2 Duo processor”
“laptop: karmic
"desktop: intrepid”

Issue 3:

“Everytime I boot up, I need to do some command line magic to get my wifi working. I'd like to better understand how it works, and fix it.”
“Dell Inspiron 1525; Broadcom BCM4312 wifi card”
Are you currently running Ubuntu on this hardware? If so, which version? “9.10”
Do you have a recent backup of your personal data? (If not, we highly recommend that you copy all data to an eternal disk. If you need help doing this, please let us know here) “Yes.”

Issue 4:

Are you coming for assistance? If so, please tell us briefly what services you need.
“9.10 is unstable on my six year old PC.”
Please tell us about your computer. What hardware is it? (Make, model, RAM, CPU, disk space)
“DELL Dimension 2400 with 1.5 GB RAM - full Sys Info available upon request.”
Are you currently running Ubuntu on this hardware? If so, which version?
“ubuntu 9.04 in Ext4 root partition separate from /home Ext3 partition.”
Do you have a recent backup of your personal data? (If not, we highly recommend that you
copy all data to an eternal disk. If you need help doing this, please let us know here)
“All 13 CDs full, yup!”