[ale] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

[Jeff Hubbs]

The only gotcha with old laptops is that many of their batteries will 
likely have gone bad and are very expensive (think >$100) to replace.  
So, having them run untethered may be a nonstarter.  Perhaps if you got 
1/5 of them set up as running LTSP nodes with good batteries, the rest 
could be made into a MOSIX cluster to use as the LTSP app server. 

Us Gentoo types salivate at the distcc potential...

- Jeff

Daniel Howard wrote:

>Folk,
>
>I've know of a school that has over 600 older laptops (either Win98 or
>Win2k) for a 1:1 grant-funded study in 2000 that now only has 50
>functional units, assumedly due to viruses, upgrading OS w/o adding more
>memory, lack of support, etc.  We want to consider converting these into
>K12LTSP thin clients using our laptop cart idea, but I wanted to make
>sure we were considering all options.
>
>We could probably load Linux OS directly onto each laptop and keep them
>as stand-alone units so the kids could take them home as the original
>model proposed, but the support issue (number of PCs to support) along
>with the need to plug them in to power daily in the classrooms and
>either plug network in or log on wirelessly makes that less desirable.
>I'd rather see the kids stay after school for a few hours to do homework
>on them when necessary and reduce the number of PCs to support by a
>factor of 50 by turning them all into thin clients that stay at the school.
>
>Are there any other ideas out there for what to do to revive 600 drunken
>laptops?
>
>Regards,
>Daniel
>
>_______________________________________________
>Ale mailing list
>Ale at ale.org
>http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
>
>  
>