Two Years of the LiNUX.COMmunity!

In the summer of 2000, Linux.com began a bold new program that would change the way the site was conceived of by its staff and by its readers. The program was Linux.com Live! Live! began with an idea by Mark Stone, then advisor to the staffs of Linux.com and Themes.org.

Mark realized that the real power of Linux.com wasn't in the software or the servers or even the articles posted every day on the front page. It was in the community behind all those efforts, and the way that community interacted via email, IRC (Internet Relay Chat), and other online communication methods. Mark set about finding a way to bring that powerful resource, and the power of the LUG installfests, directly to Linux.com's audience. The result was the Linux.com Live! Program, which utilized IRC to guide an audience through a task like partitioning and installing Linux.

If I have to practice installing Debian one more time, I will scream. There's a reason the apt-get dist-upgrade exists. -Jessica Sheffield, Interact Section Editor

The staff decided to do two demonstrations simultaneously in the OSDN booth at LWCE, August. We'd install Red Hat Linux on its own on one machine, and demonstrate partitioning a hard drive to dual-boot Microsoft Windows and Debian on the other. I was tapped to help direct the project and do the live presentations at LWCE, a job I found challenging, inspiring, and completely nerve-wracking as I suffer from stage fright! Nevertheless, we made it through the show with rave reviews.

Mark had this to say about the presentation: "Each day at the show we demonstrated a Red Hat install and a Debian Potato install in the OSDN booth. We used members of the audience to perform the install, and -- this is the key part -- rather than having them guided through the install by booth staff, we had them guided by a remote team of staff and volunteers connected over the network using Internet Relay Chat. We've now three times successfully shown that you can use IRC to guide and teach a Linux installation."

Mark continued, "The greatest proof of success came from a few of the anecdotes coming out of that week. At the end of our first demo, for example, someone in the audience approached Garrett LeSage and asked if he could bring his Windows laptop in the next day and follow along to get Linux installed on it. Sure enough, on day two I saw Garrett and this gentleman sitting side by side, working through the install. In the middle of day two's session, someone on IRC messaged Dean Henrichsmeyer and asked if we could slow down a bit, since we were getting ahead of him. Not only did we have an audience on IRC, but we had someone actually using our IRC event to help him do an install."

The program was expanded and refined over the next few months to include live chats with community developers, interviews with authors, open discussion forums, and more tutorials like the one that got it all started. In January at LWCE in New York, we demonstrated how to customize and compile the 2.4 kernel. The staff of Themes.org got in on the act too, hooking up a drawing tablet to our projection machine and starting a game of Pictionary using the Gimp. "I think the coolest thing about Gimp Pictionary was the complete geekiness of it," said Greg Sanders, Site Director of Themes.org. "We took a normal boxed game and found a way to play it completely on the computer using Open Source (free) tools." The audience loved the game, calling out the answers in exchange for, of course, free swag (kindly provided by ThinkGeek). Guest artists included Chris DiBona of community fame, Illiad from UserFriendly, some of the WindowMaker guys, and of course, the resident artists of Linux.com and Themes.org: Garrett and artwiz. It was another piece of proof that, despite the fading of the Linux boom, the community was here to stay.

Nowhere else could you win a sticker for shouting "BitchX!" -Paul Summers, Linux.com volunteer