I'd like to thank all of those who attended and helped out with this event as it was a huge success! Each person personally thanked me for helping to put together this event, stated that they had fun, and learned something new. I can't think of any better measure for success. You can view pictures from the event at the following link:

RI Linux Installfest 2008 Pictures

It was truly a fun day, with several successful (and some not so successful) Linux installations. Some of the Linux installs I witenessed and helped out with were:

• Old Pentium Machine - This machine was so old that it would not boot from a CD-ROM or USB drive. They used a floppy installation of coytote Linux to install it and use it as a firewall for a home cable modem connection.
• Backtrack on USB Thumb - A very nice person was able to get Backtrack 3 Linux distro installed onto a bootable USB thumb drive. This comes in very handy for penetration testing, especially if you have laptops that do not have a CD-ROM drive and need to gain access to a utility or two. I've run into situations on a pen test where I needed specific modules in my kernel, and the easiest and quickest way to get there was to just boot the Backtrack CD, but without a CD-ROM drive that can be tough :)
• PS3 Installation - This was attempted, using Gentoo linux, but failed due to a bad hard drive. This platform is a neat solution for password cracking due to the processing power of the PS3
• Soekris net5501 - This was my installation and was really neat. I now have this device running Debian Linux and plan to use it as my home DNS/DHCP server. It has less moving parts than a server or desktop, and generates less heat and uses less power. Besides, its just well, cool :)
• Fedora 9 - This is the latest beta version of Fedora, which also uses the latest version of the KDE desktop. It looks VERY slick.

Some of the other installs included one successful iPod Linux installation (which was followed by the question, "Okay, now what do I do with it?"), several Debian installs on older laptops and a desktop, a few VMware installs, and even an install of Red Hat Linux Enterprise. There was a lot of discussion and questions surrounding which Linux distrobution is right for me, which depends on your requirements. A great follow-up to this would be a blog posting that covers some of the Linux distros out there and what they are best used for based on our recent experiences. If anyone would like to write that, please contact me. One last thing, for the majority of the day I put up a presentation containing announcements and other silly stuff. You can download that below:

Again, thanks to all who attended & helped out!