[sf-lug] Ubuntu project for the housing project - latest info

[Romel Jacinto]

On 06/19/2007 06:27 PM, Michael Blanc wrote:

> The equipment which is to be received (on Thursday, I think), consists of bare units without screens, kbs, or rodentae, but it sounds as if they have ethernet cards and possibly CD drives.

The pc's are coming from my workplace (and are being picked up on 
Thursday) so I know exactly what the specs are:

Dell Optiplex Gx150
Small form factor (which means that these are physically smaller and 
won't take a standard-height PCI card)
900 MHz
256 MB or 512 MB RAM (more likely the latter)
CD-ROM drives
Ethernet cards are on the motherboard

The built-in video card can be somewhat temperamental when running 
monitors at higher resolutions under Ubuntu (Dapper Drake; have not 
tested with Feisty Fawn).

All of these pc's were in working condition running Windows XP when we 
decommissioned them over the past several months.

We did not donate any monitors, keyboards or mice, so I'm not sure of 
the plan for those.


> Kami's intention is to start classes there for school kids, which sounds like a worthwhile goal.
 > She wants to teach OPEN OFFICE. Can we supply an installation of it?
<snip>

Open Office comes standard with Ubuntu.


> Bring screwdrivers, not the alcohloic kind. Even bring some bootable 3.5" diskettes for diagnostic purposes.

The Optiplex Gx150's are "tool-less"; no tools are needed to swap out 
any of the replaceable components, except for the motherboard.


> We'll see how far we get. It may be that all we could do is plan out what to do next time; maybe we get the whole thing done that afternoon; we'll just see what we see.

I'm fairly busy and probably won't be able to make it this Saturday, but 
I still maintain that there should be plan (both for the installation 
and for longer term support) before diving into the install-fest, 
however I'll defer to the sf-lug collective decision.

It's fun for us to install, but these folks are going to be relying on 
these computers and if the computers are not configured properly, the 
end-users will likely get frustrated.

Let's put on a good show and illustrate what open-source software can do 
for them.

--
Romel