The release of Project Indiana is just around the corner (on May 5th). Me and some other CA's got the chance to get hands on to the bleeding-edge RC0 version from Sun, in order to get feedback about the release from as many students as we can. I was to conduct an InstallFest of sorts on campus at the end of which students would provide feedback about their installation experience, what they liked or didn't like about the new face of Solaris. I was very excited to get this opportunity to provide feedback directly to the OpenSolaris engineering team and the higher-ups at Sun, from students of JIIT! However, at such a short notice, there were problems in conducting an InstallFest in our labs, and past experience suggested that not many people show up at such an event, owing to the need of people carrying their rigs all the way from hostel to the academic block to participate. I thought out a much better way to conduct an InstallFest this time, which was bound to get good participation and would save all the trouble.. we conducted an InstallFest in the Hostel itself.

We successfully conducted a very unique novel event at our college on Sunday, which I like to call the "Virtual Installfest". What is a Virtual InstallFest? Well, In a regular installfest, members of a user group meet at a common place, bring their systems (CPU's or Laptops) along, help each other install their favourite OS, help each other troubleshoot particular problems, drink cola and have fun. A virtual install fest is one which is conducted with no physical gathering of the participants, rather one which is done digitally over the network. It is a new means of conducting InstallFests which avoids having to require the participant to take their CPU’s or Laptops anywhere and just participate in the event from the comfort of their Hostel Rooms. Yes, thats right, an InstallFest in which You don’t have to move around your precious hardware anywhere! Just be wherever you are and join us in the event!

Well, how exactly did it all happen?

To start with, I setup a local intranet website with Drupal, which:

• Had simple pages describing the concept of a virtual installfest, the details of how to participate in the event, prizes and giveaways, and links to launch the live screencast, join the chat conference, submit the feedback form, and the downloads section (more on all this later..)
  
  
  
  InstallFest Home
  
  
• Allowed a participant to register for the InstallFest, entering his personal details, and PC/Laptop configuration too. (Drupal custom profile fields)
  
• After registeration and logging in only could a participant get access to the Downloads section and the Feedback form (restrictions enforced by using the Taxonomy Access Control module for Drupal)
  
  
  
  Downloads Section
  
  
• Fill up a feedback form, which could be accessed from a link in the main menu as well as from a tab in the user's account section. The feedback form was a Drupal "content type" with CCK fields, which allowed rich-text entry too using TinyMCE. I used the nodeprofile module to restrict maximum population for that content type per user to 1, and to make it show in the user account page.
  
  
  
  Feedback Form
  
  
• Participants could logout and log back in anytime to edit their respective feedback forms.
• New downloads were made available at the Downloads section as and when required (sound drivers, etc were provided when participants requested in the chat conference).

The downloads provided were:

• OpenSolaris "Indiana" RC0 (latest build)
• VirtualBox for Windows
• VMWare 6 for Windows (trial)

The host (me in this case), conducted several "sessions", and in each session I installed OpenSolaris RC0 inside of a virtual machine (VirtualBox), broadcasting a Live Screencast of my screen to all the participants with the help of the RealVNC server and it's java client. I just set new connections to be shared by default allowing multiple clients to connect, and ofcourse, disabled remote keyboard / mouse inputs so that people couldn't take control of my system :)

All participants and the host were connected together in a chat conference. I installed OpenSolaris and everybody followed along, and whenever anyone had any problems, he could stop me by messaging in the chat conference. I responded with the solution over the conference, so that even others can rectify it if they encounter a similar problem. It turned out to be a true installfest thanks to the chat room, as in the later sessions, participants from earlier ones started helping new comers troubleshoot problems, which is the true spirit of an installfest I believe.. The chat conference was made possible with phpFreeChat, which is an amazing AJAX-based IRC-like chat application written in PHP. Setting it up was as simple as modifying some parameters in index.php.


I tried taking a screencast of the installation to replay later, but it just took too much processor usage, and made the installation slow, so I dumped that idea and just did the installations myself everytime.

As far as the prizes and giveaways are concerned, all participants were given OpenSolaris starter kits. All participants who successfully installed OpenSolaris on their systems (or inside of virtual machines) and filled up the feedback forms were entered into a lucky draw, the winner was awarded an OpenSolaris Mug, Netbeans 6 DVD, and a Sun Cap!

To conclude, the virtual installfest was a great success. Total participation was 43 students, despite it being a holiday and most of the students were outside hostel, and the event been conducted in a single hostel. I'm sure it'll scale well next time if I conduct it across the campus.

I have uploaded the local installfest website at http://installfest.jiitsunclub.org. It can be accessed by anyone, but registrations have been disabled. I just created a view using the "Views" module of Drupal, to allow sun-insiders to see the feedback. One may choose to see it first in a tabular form, to click on the person's name to see the complete feedback or just get all the feedbacks received on a single page. I have setup a "coordinator" role, and only users of this role would be able to access the "View Feedback" section.

I encourage other campus ambassadors to take up this idea and conduct similar virtual installfests in their institutes as it is an easy to conduct event, gets good participation and uses technology to the max! If anyone wants the drupal installation I had setup, I'll be happy to mail it to you.

Useful Links: 

• Blog post announcing the Virtual InstallFest
• Virtual InstallFest Poster (PDF)
  
• Virtual InstallFest Details (PDF)
• Virtual InstallFest Website (with the feedbacks)