Creating a School Computer Lab With Ubuntu For $0

An anonymous reader writes "Here is an interesting story of a school in Oakland that used old computers running Ubuntu and OpenOffice.org to provide a school computer lab for students."

Re:Free hardware?

[jones_supa]

He patiently negotiated various donations.

Re:Mechanical keyboards? Those are worth something

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In my (thankfully limited) encounters with formal disposal rules, public and private, 'just flog the stuff on ebay' is frequently far more trouble than it ends up being worth.

One major factor is that a successful institution needs to be set up so as not to be easy meat for dishonest functionaries(at least before they've worked their way to the top). Common result? Low level cogs selling things, especially things with unclear value, is not encouraged. This goes double if the said low-level cog has some degree of purchasing authority. It's just too easy to use official funds to pay at the front door, then flog gear out the back door for direct personal profit and/or kickbacks of some flavor. This does cramp a lot of perfectly legitimate plans by honest people; but tends to remain in force because nobody has a better idea about how to discourage the entrepreneurial tendencies of the chronically dishonest.

Been there, done that.

[Yvanhoe]

I think that today, in any OECD city of a moderate size, if you post an info saying "Technomancy next Tuesday at the mall ! Bring old computers, we help you install linux. Get back with a functioning, if slow, computer. Hardware donations accepted." you will have a lot, and I mean A LOT of donated hardware.

Within a few week we had to refuse too old hardware, because our usable volume was full.

Re:Linux is free

[serviscope_minor]

Now, websites on the other hand... have a nasty habit of bringing that little combo to its knees as soon as the javascript heats up and the flash-object swarm comes in on the attack.

Might I suggest installing firefox, noscript, flashblock and flash video replacer.

I have done. I also find that firefox is a much better browser on an eee 900 than chromium. Chromium gets a speed boost by using many processes, which is great if you have more than one core. If you don't, however then it has a bit of a nasty habit of sending the load average through the roof and bringing the entire machine to its knees. Some things feel a little snappier, but overall firefox is actually faster.

As a bonus, you'll get less tracking, fewer ads, much less irritating advertisment driven poor quality javascript and youtube videos in MPlayer, which can do full screen HD without a problem.

Re:Free hardware?

[Zero__Kelvin]

I don't think the phrase "just as easily" means what you think it does. Furthermore, if you have hardware with a Windows license you have still not achieved the equivalent. In that case you have an OS and hardware, but you still need applications. Yes many applications are cross platform, but in the end you are far more limited with regard to what you can and cannot do with the Windows system without additional expenditures. With Windows there is no code repository. You have to manage updates for each application seperately, whereas with Linux you can use a cron job to automate updates to the OS and the vast majority of applications. You can use Open Source substitutes for pdf and flash support as well. The advantages go on, but the point is that Windows is more prevalent due solely to ignorance, and not due to any mis-perceived advantage it has over Linux.

Re:Free hardware?

[CAIMLAS]

No, you couldn't. Or rather, this gentleman couldn't have, and it'd have been much more time consuming for anyone else to approach.

I installed Windows 7 on a new 128GB Crucial M4 SSD last night (in an i7 tower). Not latest-greatest, but by no means a slow machine! I suppose I should be more precise, in saying that I finished performing the task last night. I actually started several days ago. The process involved:

* The initial installation. This took maybe 30 minutes (as I wondered around the house getting other things done, waiting).
* Configuration of the machine. So far, it's pretty identical to a Linux install in what's done.
* First boot. I now spend an hour or two hunting for and downloading the appropriate drivers for things which aren't quiet working fully. This may or may not be similar with Linux, depending on hardware.
* Oops! Looks like there are updates to perform. Over the next two days, I ran updates, downloading everything that's been released as an update, rebooting, then re-downloading essentially the same fileset for the next update. This would've taken significantly longer if I hadn't been actively doing it. I think I went through over a dozen reboots, and obviously didn't use the computer for much during this time as a result.
* Antivirus, useful utilities, and applications - thankfully, there's Ninite, otherwise this would've taken much longer than it did, all told. Three or four hours, maybe? And I knew what I was doing.
* Oh, look. Now you've got a Windows machine with Administrator access - fine for me, but for an 8th grader? You're going to have to try to figure out how to get them to not break it.

I only spent $7 or so for the AV and had my Windows key already, and everything else was 'free software'. But between the bandwidth and monkey-like setup procedure, doing the same thing with a lab full of old Windows machines would have literally taken months. Many of the machines he was likely receiving wouldn't have even worked (presumably he had at least some with 512MB of RAM, and many with small drives). On those old systems, W7 took the better part of a full 'work day' to just get installed. If he used XP, just forget it.

Re:Free hardware?

[chrb]

More to the point. How easy for citizens in the school district to volunteer their time to help teach children in these schools?

From TFA: "He came upon a local Linux user’s group, a friendly group of people dedicated to helping people get started with free software. With the help of his local LUG, he got Linux up and running on his 18 donated machines."

So, go join your local LUG and offer to help out...