Slashdot Mirror
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
An Anonymous Coward writes "Out in Oakland, CA a group is taking donated PC's and breathing new life into them with Linux. They turn around and donate the computers to schools, build POVRAY render farms (with MOSIX) and generally promote Linux."
Linux cluster is 30 Athlon 850MHz PCs and up to 350 recently refurbished PCs that are Pentium 166 or better
I sure hope the 850 MHz Athlons weren't donated by anyone....until this week my main home machine has been an PII 300. If the Athlons were rescued from landfill that makes me feel _really_ inadequate.
There site navigation is totally borked so here are all the links on the site I could find:
Home
About
Donations
Internships
Press
as does my inability to close italics properly :)
I thought this sounded familiar... seems there are many groups working in this worthwhile way. Google directory links a few here.
If you don't live in the Oakland area there may be a group near you who you can either volunteer to help, or donate those old PCs gathering dust in the attic.
If you can't find anyone near you, why not go it alone? I installed Linux on an old box and gave it to the neighbours kid, with a bashed up old 15" monitor from the local tip.
Incidentally, Johnathan and Alan show that nothing is too old or useless for us. if you have anything strange or odd that you don't know what to do with. Give it to us.
I hope my wife doesn't see this site. she will try to donate my he-man figures.
"We recently turned down donations of an aircraft carrier and a 727", says executive director James Burgett. "But we are ready to handle a 727 the next time one is offered."
C'mon, guys...we were this close to having the Linux Air Force!
"Roger, Blue Leader, this is Blue 6...I'm taking another pass at Redmond." "Stay on target, Blue 6, stay on target..."
Carousel is a lie!
before I had to go back to italy to serve the army. It was an excellent opportunity to learn, I was taking care with other people of the beowulf cluster - and the rendering speed was impressing, around 12 seconds to render the 'famous' pvm x-vase when the cluster was around 60 nodes.
:)
the interesting part was that there were little optimization on the network and on the linux - it was a standard redhat 6.2 kernel, and the computers were just put on a shelf, connected, booted with a floppy that got the image from the network and self-installed the machine, rebooted, and you had a node ready for rendering.
on the other hand, the people working there were the most easy-going and honest I've seen so far - there were no hypocricy going on, and basically there was a place for anyone in it - still without too much trouble.
just wanted to share that with you guys, in case you wondered if such a non profit company was really working - it is. definitively.
anyone wanting to start something like that in norther italy?
cheers
-- There are two kind of sysadmins: Paranoids and Losers. (adapted from D. Bach)
As a former educator who worked in a "resource-challenged" school district, I applaud these types of programs. Unfortunately, often schools like the one I worked in would get money thrown at us for certain tech projects, but since there was often no follow-through or training, the money was pretty much wasted, or used for other purposes deemed more important by the school administrators.
It seems this organization not only refurbishes the computer, but also trains people to do it as well. If Linux is ever to get a foothold in schools, it will take a lot more effort than just donating X number of computers with Linux preinstalled. The community will have to invest time in making sure those computers are filling the need and that people on site are trained and commmitted to maintaining them.
Linux and public schools seem like a match made in heaven. Even though Microsoft gives a lot of lipservice (and money, you do have to give them some credit) to supporting schools, it still doesn't make sense to spend that kind of money on Windows licenses. One could make the argument that exposing students to an alternative like Linux will improve their technology skills (they're still gonna get the Windows exposure, no matter what's used in the schools).
Just my 2cents.
We do that
here and
here.
-... ---
I don't like that taste, yes linux is far more efficient with resources than win2k or xp. However only making it public by allowing it to run on lame machines also makes a bad reputation.
One day one student will say, "all linux boxes I worked on were lame-ass". Because they runned on some old Pentium 166, while the windoze of course just had to have the new 1.5 GHz processors, with 40x cdrom speed.
I remember a friend telling me that installing his linux told so much longer than the winxp. Of course! He installed linux on an old PC with a quad 4x speed cdrom, but winXP on one with a 32x cdrom. Now who wonders....
Same with people "trying" linux they give it a 512MB partition on the harddisk and nearly no swap drive, while windows is allowed to take the other 20GB. Now who wonders why you have that less hard disk space available on linux... (or just run it in some linux emulator at all)
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
In a word, bullshit.
If I take a computer I own, format the hard drive with an electromagnet, and donate it to a public school with a free copy of a Linux distro, what the screaming Hell(tm) does it matter that it once had Windows on it?
1) I am not giving them Windows. I am giving them the hardware.
2) I am not encouraging them to steal a copy of Windows in any way, shape or form.
3) Microsoft does not own the computer. They never did. It was my computer, therefore it's entirely my choice what to do with it.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
You hook up 10 486dx2's to make a povray render farm. It consumes 10 times as much power to do the same job as a modern intel chip. Not only did you waste your time, energy, and networking hardware; you just contributed to the fact that you local nuclear or coal power plant has to chug that extra electricity,
just to help you "reduce, reuse, and recycle".
Does that make any sense?
Um, how? Like Microsoft is going to send someone to every school to count the number of computers? And it's not like the computers are running Windows...
It would be like a health inspector fining a restaurant for having eggs kept too warm when the restaurant doesn't even have eggs.
Inspector: "That's a $200 fine. That area of the kitchen is too warm to store eggs in."
Restaraunt Manager: "But we don't store eggs there. In fact, there isn't an egg in the entire restaurant!"
I: "Doesn't matter. You could store eggs there, and that's all that counts."
Bollocks.
Kierthos
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
They're called Computer Angels
Blog
This is just a typical example of Microsoft being intentionally misleading. What the *law* says is that you can't donate your PC to the school with Windows on it and keep a copy of operating system for installation on another PC. Of course, in practice this is largely irrelevant, as Microsoft's agreements with computer manufacturers make it nearly impossible to buy a PC without Windows, so who would want an extra copy of an obsolete version? But Microsoft manages to explain this in such a way as to give the false impression that you (or the school) cannot simply erase Windows, destroy the license and the Windows disks, and install LINUX.