But it seems that a new warfront is being fought in the sphere of soft drinks with Bing Soda, Microsoft Soda and Ubuntu Cola

linuxNUS is hosting an Installfest at on 17 Sep 2009, Thursday, 745pm, at COM1 SR2.

During this community building event, people get together to do mass/Free installations of Linux Operating System and other open source software. The event is open to everyone, from the complete newbie to the expert. Novices can bring their computers along and learn from experienced users in Installation and troubleshooting problems.

Through this event, linuxNUS hopes to strengthen and build the community of Linux and Open Source users in NUS and Singapore.

For the purposes of instruction and coordination, the session will focus on the installation of Ubuntu 9.04. However, users are free to try their hand at installing other distributions during the event. Please bring the Ubuntu Live CD given out at the Welcome Tea, if you already have one as limited CDs will be provided at the event. You can download the ISO file from an NUS mirror and burn the image with CD burning software such as InfraRecorder.

If you are interested to attend the event, please kindly RSVP at http://linuxnus.org/register/installfest so that we can estimate the headcount for light refreshments.

See how our previous Installfest went here.

And here are the long awaited photos.

However, there’s been really great response from you guys, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Computing Club! As our venue (Programming Lab 2) is limited in space, we’ve had to close registration for the event.

For those of you who’ve missed out, though, fret not – this huge response will no doubt encourage future events to take place, and some might take place really soon, too! If you like, you can leave us your name at our official contact address. Or join our mailing list to receive updates!

What we’d really like is for more people to come by our IRC channel and hang out. It isn’t all that hard, now is it?

Read about the event on the Ubuntu.SG site. While registration for this event is closing soon because of limited places in Programming Lab 2, we’d like to get a sense of how many people would like to attend such an event if we were to hold another.

We are also considering a slightly more advanced workshop sometime in the near future with, again in collaboration with Ubuntu.SG, but that really depends on the response from this event’s participants. Anyone who has Ubuntu already installed on their computers and would like to hang out with us to swap tips or learn more, send email to our Yahoo group or keep in touch via our Facebook group (just search linuxNUS).

So … I am somewhat relieved that I managed to install OpenSUSE 11.0 on my laptop, in a separate partition, just the way Linux should be run. It wasn’t accepting any sort of Ubuntu CD before, though it did give me some excuse to tangle with Lilo… really long story that doesn’t belong here, hence the title.

But I’d like to remind you guys that even though lots of our events are based around Ubuntu, and more collaboration with Ubuntu-SG is in the works, there are plenty of other distros out there, and there has to be one that suits you.

… Yes, I heard you say Windows Vista. Nice try, go back to chroot jail; do not pass go, do not collect $200. If the rest of you are interested in checking out other distros, I’d recommend DistroWatch as I’d mentioned before at the recent Install Fest.

There, I’ve made a QuickPress not so quick, and managed to link a non sequitur back to the previous post. If only everything in my life was this successful

P.S. It is purely coincidence that we might be inviting OpenSUSE, well the meetup group anyway, to NUS somewhere down the line. Really.

You really should have been there. We had lots of fun! VMs were set up, guests shared stories, and we even had an ‘unplugged’ session… so to speak. It’s OK if you didn’t know what I’m talking about.

If you couldn’t make it down, but still want to get Linux on your computer, feel free to drop any of us a message on the Facebook group – we’ll arrange something, maybe even an encore install fest!

Here are the photos, courtesy of Ruiwen’s Flickr.

Stay tuned for more events to come, we’ll keep you posted!

A quick check on the wubi website, showed that the only the installer for Ubuntu 8.04.1 is available for download, despite that the latest 8.10 (codenamed Intrepid) beta has already been released on 2nd Oct. I was sorely disappointed, and was sore enough to rant at Ubuntu Forums. Thankfully, I found out here that it is possible to install Intrepid beta using a snapshot of Wubi minefield. And off I went to download Wubi-8.10-rev510.exe.

The installation is pretty idiot proof. Just double click on the downloaded executable and fill in the details before clicking install:

Next choose when to reboot:

Upon rebooting, there will be a black selection menu showing the choice of windows and Ubuntu to boot into. And there I had it, an Ubuntu system

Removal of an Wubi installation is pretty simple. Just go to Control Panel and remove Ubuntu. Done! No more messing of MBRs unless you still want to setup a dual boot

Sounds simple enough and raving to try? Check out the FAQ before you proceed. And feel free to drop by #linuxnus if you need any help. Or just drop by for some chatter Once again, the guide is on our wiki.

PS. While this post may be a bit newbie, I will be writing another post over the weekend that is more advanced over the weekend. So stay tuned.

All images are from http://wubi-installer.org.