[ale] Donated computers

William Fragakis william at fragakis.com
Fri Nov 17 16:58:34 EST 2006


(I top post - it's just the way I am)

definitely K12LTSP. Why make them Win 98 dogs or under powered Linux
boxes when you can run Fedora 6 on them (ver 6 with Fedora 6 is beta
testing now).  You need one decent server, a gigabit switch and off you
go. It is almost silly to do anything else (maybe except Edubuntu but
K12LTSP is the most turn key of them all).

There are some really good early learning programs included. 

This is exactly the kind of situation where LTSP excels.

A P4 2.4 ghz box or AMD equivalent and a gig of ram will do nicely as a
server but you could make do with less if you had to. Remember that kids
love to run graphics intensive programs so the server needs to be a bit
beefier than what adults might use.

regards,
William

On Thu, 2006-11-16 at 10:05 -0500, Alex LeDonne wrote:
> On 11/16/06, Christopher Fowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> wrote:
> > My kids' daycare was donated about 8+ computers.  Apparently my wife
> > volunteered me to take a look.  Today I looked.  It appears all of these
> > machines are Dell Dimension XPS D333 computers.  The have all the normal
> > features but are PII-333 adn 128m of memory.  Where it counts they seem
> > to be lacking.  IMO these computers would make nice boat anchors since
> > they are heavy and can grab mud easily.
> >
> > My thought is that these computers feel like circa 1998 machines.  I
> > could treat them as such.  They could load Win98 on them and then find
> > educational software from around that time that is compatible and run
> > that.  As long as the machine is good they will be in good shape.
> >
> > I wanted to try the educational version of Ubuntu but that would just
> > require too much memory and CPU.  Even trying to find and get memory for
> > these systems would be a pain.
> >
> > I wish that when people would donate computers they would at least try
> > to donate something they would find worthy for them self.  Don't donate
> > the stuff you consider trash.  I know there is a parable that talks
> > about this.....
> >
> 
> Those sound like excellent LTSP terminals. See
> http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html for the LTSP subproject specifically
> for K-12 schools and the like.
> 
> -A
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale




More information about the Ale mailing list