[K12OSN] Free computers for kids
Terrell Prude', Jr.
microman at cmosnetworks.com
Sat Mar 27 16:51:50 UTC 2004
The machines you're talking about sound like they'd also make excellent
LTSP clients! :-)
On machines that small, if you're doing standalone OS installs, I'd
recommend a lighterweight distro than Red Hat or SuSE. I've found
Vector Linux and Peanut Linux to be good for this. They don't take up a
bunch of space on the disk, either (less than 800MB for the whole
thing). Would this be an option in your case?
I'll warn you, though: on anything with less than 256MB DRAM,
OpenOffice.org (any version) is going to be S-L-O-W, be you running it
on FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, or even (gasp!) Windows 2K/XP. The kids are much
better off using apps like AbiWord and Gnumeric on such boxes anyway;
they're lightweight, functional, and reasonably quick.
--TP
anthony baldwin wrote:
> Check this out:
> School-Library.net's Free 2 Learn Project
> Free computers for students
> http://free2learn.school-library.net
>
> Im looking into the steps to initiate a non-profit now.
> I also need to nail down the details for giving away the computers
> once they're built. For my students I am going to have an essay
> contest, since I am only offering the first two machines at my present
> school, but I wonder if I should not develop a different criteria as
> this venture expands. Then again, having students write an essay
> about OSS will encourage them to learn about it, which is good. Does
> that makes this seem as much a mercenary OSS advocacy program as a
> charitable venture?
>
> I have one machine here, a pentium1, 100mhz, that I'm having trouble
> with. I used Rule/slinky to load RH8.0, but it won't run X. It seems
> to be missing libX11.so.6 and possibly some other things. I tried to
> find that on the CD and load it up, but I'm having difficulty with that.
> (mounted the cdrom and cded to it, but couldn't find stuff...weird).
> It won't run redhat-config-xfree86.
> I think, possibly, the hdd is too small and installation simply
> stopped when it ran out of room, failing to install necessary libs, or
> something. I don't really know, though. I figured rule would pare
> things down enough to fit on the hdd. I haven't even checked the size
> of it. I've downloaded Vector linux to give that a try. No other
> distro seems to load, except Corel Linux, but then it has display issues.
> I suppose this is all rather off-topic, but I thought you guys might
> be interested, in that this is, at least, about promoting OSS/Linux
> for students.
>
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