[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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