Bibliotecha’s latest stop was the AMRO 2014 Festival in Linz.
For the entirety of the festival Bibliotecha served books from a plinth in the exhibition and hosted a workshop.
The workshop took place in the first day of the festival and had as an aim the creation from scratch of Bibliotecha software images for Raspberry Pis. We believe this strategy to be a good way to introduce the project to the participants on its different levels. Another underlying goal was to use this install party to test, complete, edit, and question the installation manual we’ve haphazardly compiling since the beginning of the project.
The attending participants were interested in Bibliotecha for numerous reasons. Many saw it as an example of another type of network, that functions autonomously, and be used to sever a small community without having to rely on the Internet infrastructure. Others saw it more as solution for sharing digital files, particularly digital books. It was very inspiring to hear from Femke Snelting that for her Biblotecha encourages an act of civil disobedience – sharing digital books – in this moment in time, where the whole ecosystem of free culture seems to be disintegrating.
After some complications with the network setup – solved by the magic skills of Martino Morandi – the participants furiously cloned images, apt-geted packages, sshed into their Pis, configured files, pulled repositories, edited and completed the installation manual. By the end all the images were up-and-running and the manual completed. Yeahhh! I was also greatly gratifying hear from some of the participants that the whole process helped them understand many aspects fundamental to GNU/Linux OS.
We’d like to thank all the participants – Femke Snelting, Andreas Zingerle, Kyriakos Tsoukalas, Davide Bevilacqua, Klau Kinki, and Ivan Petkov – for having dedicated themselves to the installation of Bibliotecha and editing of the manual, as well as servus.at for hosting the workshop and very generously supporting our stay in Linz.
The resulting manual can be seen in http://wiki.bibliotecha.info/index.php?title=Manual
And more pictures in https://bibliotecha.info/imgs/amro/
