Distributions/Configurations For Specific Uses?

Page writes "My college (UMPI) is currently reviewing a proposal to collect old hardware from small businesses and assemble machines for those who do not have a PC. The issue came up as to what linux distro to use that will allow us ease of both setup and ability to lock down the machine so once they are out in the field, they cant be tinkered with by accident (thus preventing problems later). These will be used solely for the purpose of web activities (surfing/mail), and word processing and *THATS IT*. Does anyone have suggestions and an idea about how to go about a standardized (or a sort of embedded) configuration across variable hardware?"

Comments

Client/Server

[qurob]

If it's possible, why not just set up terminals?

Whether a machine is a P166 or AMD 2000+ it'll be pretty much the same. Most colleges have networked dorms and such anyhow.

You might as well go with RedHat or your favorite distro, but when you're piecing computers together you can't do much about standards. Just hope for the best!

Re:Client/Server

[TheLoneCabbage]

If you layer the network it should work fine.

first off 100mbit switches are not expensive, and 100mb suposedly can support upto 30 machines (the terminals them selves can have 10mb NICs). So use one Server per 30 terminals, and the Servers have two network cards w/o hard drives allowing them access to a central Boot Server. Maintenance should ammount to replacing dumb terminals, rebooting "servers". All administration can be done on the central boot server.

Pentium one class PCs with monitors are running less than $60 now. And they do pretty well at drawing pretty pictures on the screen. You can buy them up my the dozens and replace them just as easily. Especialy good when your dealing with college kids that tend to be rough on public equipment. (Imagine the faces of some moron who tries to steal one!!)

Re:Client/Server

[cakoose]

100 MBit switch with 10 MBit NICs? Wouldn't that dumb the switch down? How much slower would a 10 MBit switch be? Please explain, I'm a low layer network newbie.

Re:Client/Server

[vadim_t]

You're thinking of a hub. Hubs are essentially repeaters and work at the lowest common speed. If you plug 10 and 100Mbps devices into a hub it will work at 10. Hubs also send the traffic to every cable, because they're dumb.

Switches, on the other hand, are smart and direct traffic only to the machine that's receiving it. This frees a lot of network resources and means there can be much more than 100Mbps passing through a switch. A hub won't let you have 5 computers talking to 5 other computers at 100Mbps, but a switch will. The 100Mbps ones are also able to handle different speeds. In a home network that means that if you have 5 computers at 100Mbps and an ADSL/cable router at 10Mbps your network won't slow down, and you'll be able to transfer data at 100Mbps between your computers.

In this case what it means is that the server computer can have a fast network card because it sends data to everybody, but since the clients don't need so much bandwidth they can use a 10Mbps card. It's also even somewhat safer because a single client can't saturate the server's connection due to bugs or mischevous students.

Re:Client/Server

[jovlinger]

I dunno. I have a netgear dual speed hub (according to its faceplate: the DS104, if you must know) that does exactly what you claim a switch does. I must admit that I'm a bit hazy on the details as to how it goes about mapping MAC addresses to IP addresses (I just plug things in), but according to the little blinkies, when I'm downloading mp3s to the 100bT file server, the 10bT i-opener isn't getting any packets. Likewise, when I nfs read aforementioned mp3s from the i-opener, none of those packets make it to the AP, which is also connected to the hub.

So the hub clearly directs traffic, and also lets pairs of ports of the hub talk at their highest common speed.

I think you got your defns bassackwards. Could be that the market for switches has disapeared, and hubs are now cheap enough to fill that space too. However, I think your defn of a hub sounds like a bridge, but networking class was many years ago, and I'm not willing to assert that statement as a fact.

Re:Client/Server

[lithiumcloud]

I'm supposed to be doing this for my school, when I get around to it. Only difference is, we're using 486s from the attic which are all identical, and I tell you it's far easier to just install your favourite distro on there and share /usr/local and /home via NFS as long as the computers are fast enough.

Re:Client/Server

[vadim_t]

Nah, it's just that lately switches are getting cheaper. My old 5 port hub sent packets everywhere so you could sit on any computer and sniff the whole network. With a switch you can only see the traffic from and to your computer (unless it's a big expensive switch that lets you sniff everything). That's pretty much the definition of a switch, it switches traffic instead of just sending it to every cable.

Since now small switches got pretty cheap I wouldn't be surprised there's some confusion. Besides, they both do the same function, just in slightly different ways.

Re:Client/Server

[jovlinger]

Ah the solution is that the blinkes aren't total activity on the subnet, but rather ACK packets coming into the hub. So the reason the link to the main computer is blinking like mad and the mp3 player isn't is that the main computer is acking, while the mp3 isn't.

Why Linux on teh desktops

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like thin clients are the way to go, since you can centrally configure and manage them. Win2k has an excellent Terminal Services application.

We did this once...

[ites]

(But for a standardized hardware platform)
(and for an industrial application...)
Using DHCP and BOOTP, we loaded the OS and the applications across the network.
The PC had no hard disk, no drives.
The boot server was itself booted from a CDROM.
So there was nothing to break or mess with.
For word processing you'd have to use a network drive but that makes sense for backups anyhow.
Modern Linuxes are pretty good at detecting existing and especially legacy hardware.
So this approach would work for your problem.

the perfect OS...

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows NT

*ducks*

No, no no.

[Anonymous Coward]

THAT'S IT? No way!

I don't want to help you, because I think everyone should be able to play Xkobo.

LiveCD a-la Gentoo setup?

[Hobart]

You might want to take a look at how Gentoo Linux puts together their "LiveCD" for installation purposes...

Since you don't want these people to be able to change any configurations, just have a web browser and word processor, getting them to where their setup boots off of a read-only CD that has the tools they need may be the solution.

Of course, this is a large amount of work, but perhaps the time you save putting it together will outweigh the time you might loose if they mess with and break their configurations. ;)

Re:LiveCD a-la Gentoo setup?

[ianaverage]

I am using Gentoo right now, and I think that it is great, but I doubt that it is going to be what they are looking for. I could be mistaken, but I do not think that gentoo meets the ease of setup requirement.

You have to configure your partitions and the soundcard and any pretty much any other hardware yourself....and I doubt that the IT department is going to want to do that. They would have to develop a different CD for each system. It seems to me that the way things are going these days is to standardize software for both maintainability and security reasons.

To contradict myself, I could be wrong about all of this though :). I am not sure how it works, and have not used it, but Gentoo has produced a self-booting UT2003 demo disk that supposedly takes care of everything. If you could figure out how they managed to whip this up, maybe this would be the solution to your problem.

Re:LiveCD a-la Gentoo setup?

[Anonymous Coward]

He was talking about making a LiveCD (like the UT2003 CD), not a regular gentoo install.

Re:LiveCD a-la Gentoo setup?

[Hobart]

Gentoo has produced a self-booting UT2003 demo disk that supposedly takes care of everything. If you could figure out how they managed to whip this up, maybe this would be the solution to your problem.

To clarify, yes, this is what I am suggesting, that the poster look at producing a LiveCD.

But what about printing?

[billmaly]

I'll guarantee you, once you get these machines out into the world, people will want to print with them. Printers fail and are changed, how will the plans for locked down systems affect the users ability to actually create something? Otherwise, I like the concept.

Re:But what about printing?

[afidel]

have generic queue's that arent specific to a piece of hardware? I know at least one university I attended did this with one queue per floor and then had one to four printers doing the work. This may not work well without something like a study lounge with a printer on each floor of a dorm if these are to go to students in the dorm though.

Ghost

[SealTit]

Norton Ghost is a viable option. After you get the configuration set on one computer and then use ghost to make an image of it. I think the new verion of ghost plays nice with linux as long as you're using ext2 as your filesystem.

Re:Ghost

[i0chondriac]

or you could check out systemimager

http://systemimager.org/

We've successfully cloned hundreds of linux boxes with it, and it supports reiserfs and ext3

the guys on the mailing list are extrememly helpful as well.

Re:Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with Ghost is their licensing scheme..Norton expects you to pay them per computer that the image is transferred to. No joke. Transfer the image to 2000 computers? Pay for them too. I have yet to see any company or educational institution making heavy use of Norton Ghost even own a copy of the program..one of them even had a cracked .EXE and accompanying .NFO file in the same shared network directory that Ghost was installed in.

Re:Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

dd makes Ghost obsolete, as someone already pointed out.

Personally I like using tar and pax over netcat, ssh, or nfs. That way it works even if the partitions are different sizes. The inode change times will be different though. :'(

Re:Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Ghost every day. The only thing that makes Ghost real solution is haveing machines with identical hardware. Otherwise you could see some real problems when the system comes up expecting motherboard X with chip I and gets motherboard Z with chip A. Video cards, net cards, and others are the same. Lots of extra config, you would save time and headache doing a full install.

Re:Ghost

[itallushrt]

That is precisely what I was thinking. If these are all piecemeal machines how would ghosting ever be a viable option?

Re:Ghost

[scorp1us]

This is not [as much of] an issue with Linux than it is with Windows. Linux does detect and adjust to the new motherboard and architecture better, but the problem with linux lies in having the right modules installed.

But a Linux system will never crash and need re-install after a new motherboard install. Some things just might work. The system will exist in a completely stable, fixable state.

Re:Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

Ghost??? You don't need Ghost with Linux! Period. You can simply "cp /dev/hda /dev/hdb" to copy you stock image to a new machine.

Re:Ghost

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, cp with a few extra options to duplicate permissions, etc.

Think Nic and Gentoo

[ninthwave]

Some of the network appliance software can be modified to use in closed systems.
If you can download the software for the ThinkNic computers. This is basically a scaled back machine for internet browsing. You can use this as a model for scaling back services. Or you can get a distro like Gentoo, install the base system and include the services you want. Set up a user account and don't give the root password. This should lock the system enough that you can fix problems as root if needed but limits the users ability to install.

I would take the Gentoo option so that you compile optimised for the refurb machines you are using. This will help in performance over a generic installation. Then I would add the x servers and desktop, web browser, email, news client, and maybe open office, depending on your aims. Set up the user accounts. Give them access to those programs and space to save their documents in. Create xinit scripts to log them directly into x windows and they should be happy. If you focus on the process to do that you can make it an install procedure instead of a distribution and your machines will be optimised and the setup time in the end will be about the same.

Use something stable

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever you do, don't go for latest, greatest. Either Redhat or Suse, both are pretty useful, though I bias towards Suse. More importantly, include good documentation OR links to sites that contain these documentations.

Having said that, I don't understand the purpose of this initiative. I won't say its a stunt but really, I think most people can either afford a pc OR if they'll just browse etc well there are cybercafes which are in fact cheaper.

Re:Use something stable

[ninthwave]

Yes most people but institutions with limit funds can benefit from this. And I have seen some people in the council estate that can't get to the internet cafe's or afford computers. With the educational leaning of the UK, with emphasis on computers and a move to offer government forms on the internet. An iniative like this would be good for the low income people. In fact when I was living in the states I knew many people that would benefit from this because they couldn't afford a new computer, or live anywhere near a cyber cafe but could afford an ISP. So a cheap recycled computer was ideal. The closing of the system and optimising for the hardware are important. I am sure we have all built or helped a friend build a machine and the headaches of the stupid installs, and bad user management that they had, always insisting you take a look at it. This will obviously happen here so preparing for it can help minimise the head ache.

Re:Use something stable

[ninthwave]

All apologies for the typos in the above. I clicked submit instead of preview. User error, making user look silly. Though I am good at that.

*THATS IT* ?

[iangoldby]

Can you really guarantee that no one using these machines will ever want to run a non-standard application?

I know administrators love locked-down machines, but sooner or later (most probably sooner) it will become an unnecessary limitation on some of the users.

Re:*THATS IT* ?

[Anonymous Coward]

If the student really *NEEDS* to play games then they could buy their own computer

Re:*THATS IT* ?

[Gerry Gleason]

If your going to deploy a lot of systems this way, you're going to have to provide for some sort of local support. Depending on the goals, and logistics, it might be fun to do this with volunteer admins from the user community or other support staffs that are already available for other reasons (don't know enough details to say). You could even roll your own distribution to make the installation easier on the range of hardware you will see, and to lock things down somewhat, at least for the base installation.

Even if a machine gets blown out by inadvised tinkering, how hard is it to swap in another, or re-image, etc. I'm sure you'd end up with a range of skill and ability levels, but the smart ones can do all the hard stuff and make cookbook proceedures for everyone else to start from.

FireCast Linux

[wirespring]

My company WireSpring Technologies makes a custom version of Linux called FireCast that's designed specifically for remotely managed terminals like kiosks, public terminals, and the like. We've got some customers in the education industry who are doing exactly what you mention, on hardware that they were set to abandon before they found us. Even if you don't go with our software, you might get some ideas from the interactive demo. Good luck!

Re:FireCast Linux

[euphline]

Do you have an FTP site for download?

-jbn

Re:Yes

[teamhasnoi]

You can lock windows 95 down? You are the 'Great One' the legends spoke of!

All hail AC!

Why exactly would these people want to spend money on a win95 licence for each machine?

Otherwise it be great except for the security holes and virus propagation.

Why did you recommend 95 again?

Knoppix -- bootable CD with Moz, Open Office, etc.

[Chuck Messenger]

Knoppix sounds like it would be perfect. It's a bootable Linux CD, which includes lots of useful software, including Moz and Open Office. So, users couldn't accidentally screw it up. It did a nice job with the 2 computers I tried it on. It can access an attached hard drive or floppy, for storing files. Not sure how it deals with Moz profiles, for setting up email. But you could always set them up with web mail.

I've done this too

[nogoodmonkey]

I did this before with a Redhat Linux machine, and then diskless SGI Indy workstations. They made fairly nice remote X terminals. It worked out much better than buying some of the off-the-shelf terminals.

Red Hat 8.0 Hands down

[Anonymous Coward]

You should use red hat 8.0 no questions asked. I am using it on my box and it far exceeds windows in its whole-goodness and ease of use (a first for the linux desktop IMHO.) Comes with Ximian evolution, openoffice suite, and mozilla 1.0.1 What more can you need?

Re:Red Hat 8.0 Hands down

[hatrisc]

joking right? you don't want to install 40 different computers. that's way time consuming, and then if you need to change something, you have to change it on 40 different computers. the other solutions mentioned here, are way better than taking a leap to installing a 3-4 cd system on each computer. ugh.

Re:Yes

[theflea]

He's right. a p100 with 16-32 megs of ram will run windows 95 with word 97 nicely. If you have to have linux solution, LTSP is outstanding, but dialup clients couldn't use this option.

I second Knoppix

[timothy]

It's slick, has tons of included applications, can access a hard drive but will not be bothered by anything actually *done* to the hard drive, can print to most normal linux-compatable printers. I find it hard to believe when using it that it's all from one CD.

LTSP, but in the home?

[Anonymous Coward]

For a handful of low end pcs or more in a Tbase100 with a nice fast and redundant server is one I do alot of. Linux Terminal Server Project is good for info on this. But for homes perhaps not? Wasn't the question more about os config to make the box rugged when used by "users" for a finite set of tasks? A hardening script or set of...? Personally I prefer a bare metal recovery option off cds using tar rather than restricting users too much. As for hardware support, I consider that one of linux strengths especially with slightly older lower specced stuff... IMHO

your ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a big mandrake fan myself, but I have to say on an old computer and old hardware I would use redhad 6.2, because I have yet to find a machine it does'nt work on.
(I'm sure you will find an exception to this)

A machine that's locked down today....

[i0chondriac]

May not be "locked down" tomorrow. Keeping the machines secure, whether or not they are a server or desktop, requires maintenance.

It is for this very reason I recommend SuSE on the desktop, as they offer free and easy updates via YaST, and SuSE boxen are extrememely easy to set up. The SuSE personal firewall is fairly nice and intuitive for the average user as well. Additionally, it comes bundled with Open Office and a slew of browsers and email apps.

Re:A machine that's locked down today....

[NorthWoodsman]

He's not trying to lock it down so it's completely secure, he's just trying to make it relatively idiot-proof. They should be able to get in and change settings if they want, it just needs to be correctly configured initally, so people don't have to edit settings.

Re:A machine that's locked down today....

[Anonymous Coward]

thats not what he means by locked down DA

Anything should work.

[halftrack]

Any distro should work (choose Debian.) Most distro feature some form of automated installation.

PCI hardware is rarely a problem with newer kernels/distros, but if you're talking P100s and 486s with isa cards you may run into problems requiring custom setups (might be fun.)

Linux distros are by default (I'm going to regret saying this) locked down, but (I'm regretting) should be tweaked with boot passwords, firewalls (and updates.)

If possible running the machines as thin clients is a option to considere. (Although you would need to add a few strong servers which will add to your sofar 0$ budget.)

Knoppix

[beninkster]

Why not check out knoppix?

This distribution autodetects a tonne (I'm Canadian) of hardware. It runs off of the CD, however, you can set it up to store configuration settings on the hard disk. Thus, if you have any problems, you simply reboot.

I would take a look at LFS 4.0 in combination with the sources for Knoppix. Roll your own distro based on them. An added benefit of doing things this way: you can redefine the default settings so that nothing ever needs to be written to the hard disk.

LTSP / K12LTSP

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with the previous posts about netbooting. Take a gool look at the LTSP / K12LTSP projects. The boot images that are assigned can be modified for specific machines based on MAC address, allowing you to configure lesser hardware to use the processing power of the server, and newer hardware to use its own processing power, with network storage of all ./home directories and apps. You can even use a modified version of DHCPd and an appropreate MacOS image to boot most Mac computers this way.

Word of warning, do not try and place the LTSP servers in a "server farm", spread them out over the network.

By having the computers as diskless workstations you can greatly simplify the long-term IT overhead of these systems, while at the same time accomplishing your goals.

For LTSP See:
k12ltsp.org
ltsp.org

For the modified DHCPd to do Mac NetBooting:
staff.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/~rlinewe aver/macnb/

Re:LTSP / K12LTSP

[_Spirit]

We had something like this when I did my comp sci. Our workstations booted off the network, and all of our storage space was there as well. The internal disks on the workstations were used for swapfiles.

Re:LTSP / K12LTSP

[agnosonga]

We used K12LTSP at our high school, I highly recommend it

Mandrake (9.0)

[buchanmilne]

Mandrake is probably the best desktop distro out there (or, at least one of the top 3), plus all the tools (config and installer) are GPL, so you can customise to your heart's content.

There are people on the development list who use this for commercial systems. You can set it up so that (if you write your own ISO) it will boot up and auto-install the machine (assuming there aren't any partitions you want), and you can customise all the actions that get run.

See what the XBox team did.

Apparently you can try this (on a disk that has not data you require) by booting with the 'oem' option (after getting to the syslinux prompt by hitting F1 at the boot screen on the CD).

Also, if you don't have CDROMS to install with, you can do network installs, especially if you use a boot server (dhcp or dhcp + PXE), which you can customise in the same way.

Of course, locking down a box will always take experimentation, but Mandrake's msec tools (in conjunction with a /etc/security/msec/levels.local file) will allow you to do this easily, and will keep enforcing the permissions if you want it to. Plus, there's a gui for configuring this.

Re:The correlation between annonymous coward and p

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the problem is obviously yours and is simply a desire to put a handle to each post. Do you know me better if I have a handle?

kiosk mode

[jd142]

Do a search on google for Kiosk mode linux. There are a couple of projects out there. The idea with a kiosk is that it is a public machine dedicated to web surfing only, which would include using web based e-mail. It should be locked down really tightly, because people love to play with public machines.

I would suggest using icewm as a window manager. It runs fast on slower machines and the configuration files are easy to read and understand even before your read the fine manuals. I would also suggest mozilla as your web browser. You can really restrict it by changing lines in the .js and .rdf files.

Well... LindowsOS is out of the question

[Opiuman]

Since it is setup to work as 'root' at all times. Maybe if you tinker with it to run as a user? Because otherwise it is a very nice and easy distribution for end-users.

Re:Well... LindowsOS is out of the question

[ites]

Yes, just tried another LindowsOS install on a random box here. Insert CDROM, boot, click 'Ok', 'Next', 'Ok', 'Next', enter root password, confirm root password, click 'Ok', and wait for 4 minutes as it formats the disk and installs at the same time.
And that's it. Every device correctly detected, network and a firewall correctly installed, and the OS updated via Debian's apt and the network.
It is almost as fast to install from scratch as to boot a normal PC.
So, you can 'lock down' the PC simply by reinstalling at will. Say every Monday morning, at 6am. I'm sure this could be automated. :)

Depends

[dr.Flake]

Depends on how "closed"do you want you're machine to be.

What kind of people will be using them? the guy who wrote the slapper worm while he is in jail, college students, or members of staff who you can slap on the wrist???

the point is:

any machine you can fysically access can be tampered with. period. If you make it a thin client you'll still be able to remove the bootP, put in a harddisk and make it your own.

So de level of security and effort you put into this depends more on the public thats going to use them than on the distribution you use.

thin clients are very easy to maintain, have few rotating parts, are not very attractive for theft and can be replaced pretty quick.

Re:Depends

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy who wrote the slapper worm is in jail?

I thought he was in a tavern having people buy him drinks.

Two solutions to the problem

[nenolod]

Solution 1: Requires a network.
1. Establish a BOOTP and DHCP server.
2. Set your computer's BIOS configuration to boot off the network.
3. Install the applications you need onto the server.
4. When the workstation is turned on, it will load the operating system from the server, and work off the server.

Any system would work for this, but if you're looking for cost efficiency, this configuration should work nicely:
- Any old Socket 7 motherboard.
- A Pentium 200, maybe 233.
- 64mb ram, maybe 128.
- Standard network card (it would be best if this was onboard)
- 15" Monitor

Option 2:
Install a base distribution of Linux, something that would be simple and easy to understand (i.e. Redhat, mandrake or suse). Base config would be the same for this, except you would need a 1.6gb hard drive.

Sounds like you need JWZ's kiosk.

[faster]

http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

Re:Important:

[axis-techno-geek]

How true, once the machines are out in the wild, if they have a floppy or CD-ROM, user "A" just downloads or gets a copy of the distro you used, boots into Rescue mode and has a grand old time.

You would be better off giving them a "rescue" CD that reformats their drive and puts the OS back to where it was, painful, but users remember that kind of pain and think "...hmmm last time I tried something I was not quite sure about, I lost everything."

Cuts down on support costs too

User: My computer won't start?

Support: Insert your "rescue" CD and restart your system, have a nice day.

It won't stop them all, but it will stop some.

Try Redhat 8

[MrLinuxHead]

I am in the process of setting up a old pc for a bud to use as a home pc with just dialup, web, email, (MOZILLA!), Open Office, and a couple of games on it and I am setting up a Kickstart file to save for future use. You can tinker with the setting and save it to a floppy and use it to clone systems with a similar configuration.

I am assuming these PC's will be off-site, and so remote X sessions would be out of the question as posters above have sugested... Bummer.

Redhat 8 is real nice for me so far, looks good, works good, is less filling, and AFAIK, you can make it fairly idiot-proof.

Good Luck.

Re:Try Redhat 8

[Anonymous Coward]

I find the new look of redhat 8 a little distressing. I hope to get over it and try using it soon...

There are several

[vadim_t]

I'm not completely sure about Knoppix because I never used it, but I've heard it's very good. Debian looks like another good choice. Some things that are great about it is that stable is *stable* and security fixes are easy to automate, for example apt-get upgrade in cron using your own source to install only tested patches, and in general its configuration is very simple. Unlike Mandrake and other fancy distributions, Debian has very simple boot scripts and configuration, which makes it much easier to adapt it to your needs. It also has some great tools like make-kpkg that make it much easier to compile a kernel that will be installed on several computers.

Re:Ghost - HELL NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Norton Ghost is the equivelent of 2 commands in linux: (Aside from mkfs)
First, make your image(s):
dd if=/dev/hda bs=512 of=/somepath/bootsector
dd if=/dev/hda1 of=/somepath/diskimage

Then copy it to a machine:
(format you fiel system using mkfs)
dd of=/dev/hda bs=512 if=/somepath/bootsector
dd of=/dev/hda1 if=/somepath/diskimage

QNX web demo and Yahoo mail services.

[teamhasnoi]

That would be fast as hell, secure (no hard drive) and (free, free and free). You can type all you want in the notepad on Yahoo.

Community Service for Geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

I've thought of starting something similar to this at my university in Orlando. Me and my friends alone have enough less-than-beefy parts left over from upgrades to make machines. And one computer, even if it's only 400 MHz, could make a real difference to some kid whose family can't afford to expose him to computing.

Not having tech skills can be a real blow to class mobility. There's reasons why geeks are frequently thought of as elitist. We're not known as the most socially or financially generous group. We don't tend to help others up, just people within our own community. The hardware races we engage in seem like a flagrant waste to people that can't pay their power bills as we whine for more RAM. Contributing refurbished machines to needy families could go a long ways towards improving our social stigmas. It could also help to ensure that struggling families can add some valuable skills to their resumes without investing money they don't have; giving them skills gives them better earning potential, and a way to improve their situation.

Even aside from that, it's just cool to watch a 6-year-old learn how to work a computer. It's undeniably cute.

Is there a counrty-wide group that does this that we could hook into? It'd be nice if we could get requests and need lists from more than just the university community.

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[xchino]

I disagree. While "elitists" do exist that wouldn't bother to tell you how to set your system time exist, my experience is that most of us geeks do a great deal of charity work for our schools, friends, and families. It's only when we're around lesser "elitist" windows geeks that we turn super-elitist. :)

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[negacao]

If you find a group like this, please let me know via email, krism (at) mailsnare (dot) net.
I would love to help with something like this. I have a couple of old boxes sitting around, ...
:)

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[MojoRising]

>>Contributing refurbished machines to needy >>families could go a long ways towards improving >>our social stigmas.

Taking a bath and wearing clean clothes would not hurt either...

Mojo

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

"There's reasons why geeks are frequently thought of as elitist. We're not known as the most socially or financially generous group. We don't tend to help others up"

Speak for yourself, I personaly built and gave away 14 computers to deserving families last year.

How do I decide who is deserving?
1 or more children, no computer. Note: a 486 or less counts as no computer.

How do I get parts?
1. I am a geek, this stuff is attracted to me.
2. My customers give me old hardware, that I have replaced for them.
3. My own preloved parts.
4. Once in a while I even kick in a few bucks of my own.

Why do I do it?
1. It feels good.
2. I am greedy, and want to have that feeling all the time.

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[eugene ts wong]

Actually, he should just submit a story on /. I'm sure that a lot of people would be interested in this. I assume that the editors would be gracious enough to post the story.

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa. Notice I said 'tend.' As in, this is a generalization, and not an absolute.

But on the whole, my classmates tend to be more interested in getting famous and highly paid than in being nice and helping out. They usually would rather smoke a lot of pot and watch videos than help out anyone, including their own project group members. Even the people that seem responsible don't tend to take on any community projects. Most of it is geared for "let's get military funding and walk down easy street."

Once more, not a rule, but a discouraging tendency.

Re:Community Service for Geeks

[theora55]

I'd also be interested in an effort like this. My company donates retired equipment. There's a few of us that rehab it for non-profit groups. You can respond to mbdoh-four-one-oh-oneatyahoo. change the letters into numbers.

Just mount /dev/hd1 ro

[Anonymous Coward]

Use any distro.
Mount your /, /usr, /etc paritions read-only.
Mount /var, /tmp, /home patitions read-write.

Don't give out the root password.

Done!

Maybe a live CD..

[xchino]

would be beneficial.. the user would have a difficult time of screwing up his OS if he can't write to it. A small HDD or a network fileserver would be needed to store data on, though.

Several Live CD distro's exist, such as demolinux, which has a version that comes with OpenOffice..

Two Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Slackware

Well, okay that's only one word, but it sounded cool at the time. Slackware runs on everything from high-end stuff to bargain basement 386's, and runs well. You can tailor the installation yourself and not worry about things.

The big thing is to just install these "THAT'S IT" programs and nothing else. Don't install gnutella clients, don't install limewire. Don't give them the chance to screw things up. If they do it themselves (and they will) your policy will be "we reformat your drive for you and you re-start from the system image". Once that happens to them once they won't be big on screwing themselves over a second time.

Re:Knoppix -- bootable CD with Moz, Open Office, e

[Unholy_Kingfish]

I think that Knoppix would be a good stating point. Set up accounts for all the users(which most universities already do), and give them XXmb of storage for saving documents. You can ad some scripts that would make their default that space. (moding the Knoppix CD) That CD would be used to boot form on all the systems, you _could_ even skip using a hard drive in the system, but it would be slow without the swap file. Now all systems would have the SAME setup, same menus, everything. Each user would have his/her own name and pw to get into the network and their storage. When it is time to update the software you just send out new CD's to each user and they replace the old one. So lets say as the project continues you can make a more specific install with more or less programs, custom programs whatever. Do a test release to one floor in a dorm and see how it goes... tweak and tweak and tweak.... ________________________________ Michael Alexander

Re:Important:

[Anonymous Coward]

You would be better off giving them a "rescue" CD that reformats their drive and puts the OS back to where it was, painful, but users remember that kind of pain and think "...hmmm last time I tried something I was not quite sure about, I lost everything."

This kind of attitude really bugs me. I work in an IT department, and the attitude here is that the average worker's data is worthless. If the user messes up one little thing they just do a restore and wipe out everything. Thanks but no thanks.

You have to respect the data of the user. Remember, they trust what you say about computers like they would trust a doctor. Don't tell them it can't be done if it can, that's just wrong.

A plethora of options

[j_kenpo]

There are actually plenty of ways of doing this... the two best ways are a Linux based terminal running as a X-Terminal, or a Windows based Terminal Server setup. Both have their pros and cons of course. The Windows setup has the more familiar user interface and setup. The Linux setup would be free, secure and have plenty of alternatives for applications to choose from. Both are pretty slow as Terminals however. You could go with a easier local installation of either Linux or Windows, both can be locked down pretty tightly. With Windows you can manage the policies, get a setup you like, and image or use Nortons Ghost to copy to different machines. If I had to choose however, I would go with a Linux setup that would boot off an image on a server, so that no matter what changes were made it would always go back to the original setup. Keep it light and have NFSed directories with the applications, having the permissions set so that users could not modify. If you were really crafty, you could even set it up so that if there were compiles to be done, it could distribute the process acorss multiple machines...

Re:Red Hat

[notanatheist]

I should knock it down to Troll but I'd rather add my vote. Slackware I think would be easier to lock down if you were doing an OS on each system. All your common software like OpenOffice, Mozilla, and others run perfectly fine on Slack and Slack handles the older hardware a little better than the new distros from RedHat, Mandrake, or Suse. LiveCDs are a nice idea but a little hard drive storage is nice. That's my $0.03

Kawaii Linux

[MsGeek]

This is what the Kawaii Linux project is all about. The idea is to create a graphical Linux distribution that will run on everything from 486DX on up. Right now we're looking at doing this with Debian and an installer currently being developed by an Australian developer which will smooth out the usually cryptic Debian install process to a better extent than even the Progeny installer.

The target for Kawaii Linux is people who are refurbishing old computers for distribution to charities and underprivileged kids. A secondary target is those who want to play with Debian but are intimidated by the usual install process, although Xandros and the Progeny Installer address those issues too.

This will be a K.I.S.S. distro in the tradition of Lycoris. The goal is a fast install with the best of breed amongst lightweight applications. If you are interested in the project, email me.

Re:Kawaii Linux

[Raleel]

How about a link for kawaii? I can't find it in google :)

Normal install + cleanup login script

[InodoroPereyra]

There were a couple similar requests in Slashdot recently, please do a search for more. The simplest idea I read at the time was the following. Do a basic install, configure a simple desktop for a typical user, save the corresponding "/home/user" somewhere as root so nobody can mess it up. Set the PC up only for one user. Then let people login, but make sure that when they log out the only home directory in the machine gets wiped out and the original setup is copied back from the place where it is backed up.

You will need to probably run a very lightweight desktop such as Xfce, if your hardware is very old. If you use Mandrake, you can play around choosing a minimal set of packages in the install, and then save the packages list on a floppy so that you only need to do the selection once. Installing in the rest of the machines will be much faster. Probably half an hour or so per machine if you do a light install.

Good luck, and thank you for choosing GNU/Linux :-)

The right tool ...

[supergiovane]

... directly from previous news.

I asked this once.

[TellarHK]

It made it to Ask Slashdot a few weeks ago when I was asking what to do about an older machine I was buidling up to give to my aunt and uncle. It just seemed that nobody really had any -good- answers, and I wasn't even trying to get anyone on the Internet. Older machines really tend to be hugely problematic with newer Linux distributions, so the best I could reccommend based on my experience with Old Crap at Washington County Tech and with my aunt and uncle's machine, would be QNX if capable, and Windows 98 otherwise.

But, if you're working in the 200-300Mhz range instead of the 1-200 range, or have decent hardware... Bah. It's a very hard call to make. I tried three different distributions and two OS options before settling on handing over my old Windows 98.

Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but...

[bodly]

I understand that you're doing this with the best of intentions and all, but do you really want to totally lock them down?

Basically you'll just be giving these people glorified word processors instead of real computers. While I applaud this effort, it's really a very short sighted (imho) goal. It reminds me of the parable about giving a man a fish and teaching a man to fish. You are very much just giving away fish and locking out the possibility of learning to fish.

I understand that if you give them out with root passwords you'd probably just end up with mostly unworking boxes in a short time. You'd probably also have a support nightmare, with people expecting help with their free computer. I'm just wondering if there isn't some middle road where you can leave things semi-open to change and configuration without leaving it completely vulnerable.

As for advice, I dunno, I've always been better with questions than answers. :-)

Re:Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

In Japan many students bought glorified typewritters. These were laptops that had one purpose; you type a letter in them and it could save or print it out.

That is all this is; a glorified typewritter. What does a student really need? To do their reports, surf the net for research/pleasure, and chat on Jabber/ICQ/MSN/AOL/Yahoo! This lets students do all that without having to know anything about using or maintaining a computer.

And it frees up space in the computer labs.

Re:Not to look a gift horse in the mouth, but...

[JasonAsbahr]

Adding a terminal app, compiler, editor, and source doesn't make a student *have* to know about using or maintaining a computer, but gives them the option to learn more if they choose to do so.

HomeBase desktop

[BorgDrone]

How about OEone's HomeBase DESKTOP

Screenshots

Customized Redhat Installation

[Anonymous Coward]

I came across the following recently which describe how to create custom RedHat installation for exactly that kind of purpose. http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/linuxsm/Custom izeInstallation/toc.html

Desktop, Try OEone Homebase

[CastrTroy]

You might want to consider takign a look at the HomeBase Desktop from OEone. It is a slimmed down, easy to use desktop for just the features you are looking for. Web browsing, Mail, and Wordprocessing are just one click away through icons on the bottom of the screen. It comes with other software such as media player. But these can most likely be removed if you don't need them.

Not too difficult...

[psychosis]

I know that people here tend to knock the larger distros (RedHat, et al), but in my experience, they've done a pretty good job at booting and installing OK on some pretty old and varied hardware.
I'd say that using a recent redhat version with a properly configured kickstart floppy disk (NFS-mount the installation media, lock down the GRUB password, only install a certain package set, etc), you should be in good shape.
I've done kickstarts before, and they are really slick...

I was thinking about doing this...

[radiashun]

...back when I was in high school. The only problem I ran into was this:
If you donate a linux box to someone who doesn't own a computer, what are the chances that they will be able to operate it? How will they keep up on all of the patches? What will they do if they have problems operating linux? Generally they can't get just anyone to help them out because linux users are a minority (granted, this isn't so much of a problem in a university setting). Typically someone who doesn't own a computer isn't exactly computer literate. How can we expect someone who doesn't even know how to use windows correctly navigate linux? Let's face it, they aren't going to spend their time pouring over technical books. Overall though, I guess it's better to have a computer and not know how to really use it than to have nothing at all. Just my 2 cents..

Too much bandwidth/effort

[ColGraff]

Two problems with graphical terminals: One, they'll need extra bandwidth, and a lot of colleges (like mine until this year) are only 10 mbit. Also, the whole idea here is to turn out a solution that the techs will never, ever have to touch again. Terminal/server systems would be the responsibility of the techs.

Re:Too much bandwidth/effort

[Anonymous Coward]

Eventual network upgrade is almost certainly a given. Don't worry about the bandwidth.

I'd install NetBSD

[Faggot]

NetBSD (at version 1.6 now) is a wonderful and lean operating system which can be tailored to specific needs quite easily. Unlike bloated Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE... basically everything but Slack) it installs only the bare necessities, and the rest can be installed via the kickass package system. You don't have to worry about security holes popping up every six days either -- everything just runs. I'm sure NetBSD could serve the poster's needs 100%.

Re:I'd install NetBSD

[Noryungi]

Yes, NetBSD is a good choice, especially if you have odd hardware lying around, waiting to be put back to good use.

If you stick to old i386 PC and want to keep Linux on all machines, I suggest Slackware, or something like Tiny Linux, which is based on an old version of Slackware.

Re:I'd install NetBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Debian isn't bloated! :-)

NetBSD does rock though. They don't even have perl in the base system. I used to hate that, but then I realized... hey... I can install perl 5.8.0 or 6 without having to "hide" it from the system software (like I have to on FreeBSD -- PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin -- oops, wrong perl *barf* -- ::shudder::). Plus they include Postfix, how cool is that?

And to top it all off, they don't have Theo the Rat, unlike this supposedly "secure" OS.

Re No don't

[egarland]

RedHat 8.0 doesn't have a 386/486 kernel so if you are using old hardware it's probably out of the question. It's also way too bloated and slow for old hardware.

Re:Important:

[Anonymous Coward]

>User: My computer won't start?
>
>Support: Insert your "rescue" CD and restart your system, have a nice day

To bad if the user had a hardware failure =)

Oeone

[Khazunga]

You might want to have a look at oeone. It's not a distro, but a user environment specifically designed to be simple and foolproof, with a limited set of functionality. Couple it with some kind of LiveCD such as Gentoo's and you're set.

Re: OEone

[Raleel]

For those suggesting OEone, you might take a look at the hardware required to run it. It's beyond many older systems (think 3-5 years old). Yes ram is cheap, but not that cheap when you are looking at people volunteering and free machines. $30 of ram is a significant investment.

Really, I'd love OEone on this type of system, but it's just a little much I think.

We're doing this as well

[Raleel]

Only our LUG got approached by a nonprofit.

Several of the people here have made itneresting suggestions, but I doubt they really read the question. There are several things that can be inferred from your statement.

1) These machines are going out into "the field", meaning network will be, at best, occasionally dial up.

2) You are getting hardware dicarded by businesses. My guess is that this is pentium 2 hardware at best, and probably mostly pentiums. and probably less than 128 megs of ram...likely 32 and 64.

We have this exact problem. We have a mess of older hardware and want to get as many machines as we can out to the people.

So what's our solution? We are still exploring, Currently, though, the front runner is gentoo compiled on another faster box (but with optimizations for the target platform, a pentium) and then image the discs with mondo-rescue. mandrake is also in there, as well as (of all things) corel.

What are we currently running for software?
1) abiword
2) opera (static, free download version)
3) gnumeric
4) gnucash
5) icewm (with the Pure95/Windows 95 theme)
6) rox (with the pinboard enabled for desktop control)
7) sylpheed
8) tuxtype (need for a typing tutor)
9) gaim (I am a firm believer in instant messaging)

And there are several "support" programs as well.
Currently, it's taking up nearly 1.5 gigs, but I compiled it rather fat...with all the library support. We lefted 1/2 a gig for home and 128 meg for swap.

And so I tested it out on my athlon, but I turned myself down to 32 megs of ram, and it's still pretty damn fast on my desktop. Probably be just fine when i get it imaged out there. My intention will be to configure it with standard svga drivers in some lower resolution that almost any card will support (800x600, 16 bit color) and try to be as standard as I can with the sound. I compiled the kernel fat as hell (1.4M, 90% of everything actually compiled in, not as modules :-O ) but everything works, which is a bonus.

email me (musashi@owt.com) or contact our lug (3clug@3clug.org) and we'll swap notes.

BSD Is DYING!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now dropping down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSDs have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSDs are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSDs face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSDs because *BSDs are dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSDs. As many of us are already aware, *BSDs continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that *BSDs have steadily declined in market share. *BSDs are very sick and they're long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSDs are to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSDs continue to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save them at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSDs are dead. Fact: *BSDs are dying

done this - chroot

[Permission Denied]

I've done this. Basically, set up public email/web kiosks.

1. Password-protect the BIOS. People will mess with this.
2. Be careful with the boot manager. Make sure people can't pass kernel arguments (eg "linux init=/bin/sh"). Grub allows you more options than lilo in this direction.
3. Modify all boot scripts to ensure there is no way to get an interactive shell at boot.
4. Use some filesystem that's resilient to reboots. People will reboot the machines (unplug them) all the time, so use ReiserFS or ext3.
5. You'll probably have more than one person managing these machines. Try looking into pam_ldap, or pam_krb5 (whatever is appropriate for your organization) along with pam_listfile, so that only two or three people know the root password.
6. Browsers aren't meant to do this. For instance, you can type in a URL like "file:///" and use the browser as a file manager. Prevent this by running the web browser in a chrooted environment.
7. Disk space may be low on older machines, so don't copy files to the chrooted environment - hard link them instead (hard links work across chrooted environments). Basically, what you do is "ldd browser" and hard link all those libraries into the chrooted environment. Then run the browser, see what files it requires (eg, /etc/resolv.conf, any shared libraries it loads itself using dlopen(3), and so on), hard link those files and continue until you have a working environment.
8. Also on the browser end, you may have difficulties finding a browser that will run quickly enough on older hardware. Mozilla and Konqueror are sluggish on my Athlon XP 1800+, so they are quite out of the question. I also had little success with Opera, and I'll tell you now that Netscape 4.x may be your only viable choice.
9. I wrote my own window manager custom to the task. I would recommend that you run a window manager that you KNOW won't launch any other programs unless you specifically make it do so. Look into wm2, and then modify it (it's very clean code) so that it will never start up xterm and so the root menu shows a list of allowed programs (browser, ssh to read mail, etc).
10. You may also want to allow people to read mail using SSH. Remember to disable the "escape" character for ssh so people can't drop into a shell. I wrote a small front-end to ssh that pops up a GUI asking for username and password (and I modified SSH to take the username and password from the GUI using unix domain sockets). People really appreciated the little GUI, but there are some issues involved in this and you need to be experienced in Unix/C (openssh nowadays comes with its own program that pops a GUI asking for password, but it behaves in such an unfamiliar way (eg, not like Windows or MacOS where you two text boxes asking for username and password at once and the password field shows you how many characters you've typed) that it's completely useless for this situation).
11. I used tar to image the machines. I couldn't use a dedicated IDE drive duplicator since the drives were different sizes and I NEEDED all the space I could get on the drives. It basically goes like this: put src and target drives in machine, boot off src, fdisk/format target, mount target on /mnt, and then do cd /; tar -cf - bin usr var lib etc | (cd /mnt ; tar -xvf -). Make sure you don't specify proc or any other directories you don't need and then remember to create /mnt, /tmp, and so on the target drive. This doesn't take long and you can train a plentiful non-unix person to help you do it.
12. Don't expect great success. Most of your users (especially those that don't have computers) will have never seen anything that's not MacOS or Windows and they won't like the systems simply because they look unfamiliar.

Anyway, I'm a coder, not admin, at heart, so I ended up doing a lot of custom code (custom window manager, SSH front-end, stuff to get netscape to start up chrooted, etc) and it was a big time sink for the little benefit that it provided (people didn't like using the kiosks). Have fun.

Re:Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

> Why did you recommend 95 again?

Cause he's a troll silly, move along, nothing to see here.

I can lock Win95 down really easily. Just give me a sledgehammer, a blowtorch, a couple gallons of gasoline, and half a bottle of Jimmy Beam...

Re:Important:

[afidel]

Network mount their home directory from some sort of central managed storage, give them 10-100MB depending on your budget and don't worry about the pc. This is what unix is really good for =)

Multiple Options

[swv3752]

A live CD like Knoppix or DemoLinux will work well, but you are stuck with the cd and have limitations like slow cdrom access. LTSP or Kiosk Linux work well, though they necisitate(sp?) a good network connection.

You could also load a full distro on the HD. With utils like kudzu, Linux handles multiple hardware from one image alot more gracefully then other OS's. Choose a smaller distro like Vector Linux. It was designed to be used on older hardware and has version even for 486 machines. Others have suggested IceWM. That is a good choice as it is liteweight and has similiar interface to Windows. For Browsers, I suggest Galeon (GTK+) if you have room for the GNOME libraries and Mozilla to be installed, another decent choice is Pheonix, though that is kinda new. For email, something lite like Sylpheed (GTK+ again) or Kmail (QT) is good. For Office, Abiword adn Gnumeric (GTK+) is excellent for the Lite stuff. If table support is necessary, then use OpenOffice (and maybe still use gnumeric). A normal install for Vector runs about 300mb, so most any machine should have the space for it.

Killer configuration

[Begemot]

Paper, pen, and a good pr0n magazine would satisfy most of everybody's word processing / web activities ;)

My usual 2cents

[WetCat]

Vservers (here)
may be helpful as restricted usage environments.

OEone HomeBase Desktop

[PineHall]

I think OEone's HomeBase Desktop could do the job.

Re:Ghost - HELL NO! dd, hell slow!

[Anonymous Coward]

tar up onto cdr /boot and / and others if you have. use tomsrootboot to boot the dest machine make partitions and file systems, mount cd and hdd, cd /mnt/slash, chroot, untar from cd, run lilo, reboot, done.

any distro should work

[Sherloqq]

As a few posters already mentioned, any distribution would probably work. From your rather short question it's hard to give an example of a definite solution. Some questions which come to mind are:
- how will these people access the net once they have the machines at their final destination? ethernet? modem? how will
they get network information? static? dhcp?
- how do you want to assure that the machines are not 'tinkered with'? no root? no sudo?
- how do you want to arrange for security / functionality updates / upgrades? will the people need to come in with their equipment to you? will the updates take place after the user is done surfing (a la AOL)? will they be automatic (you run 'current' on a central server with updates, they run a cron job as root to check for updates once a day, say)? will a pop-up ask them if they want to download updates now? schedule for later?

Questions abound. I can say for certain that most of the questions just posed are solvable with RedHat, because I've done it here (albeit for a more less unified platform hardware-wise). You can set up a kickstart server, auto-partition drives, throw in a set of custom packages + dependencies, configure various subsystems etc etc. You should try to determine the ranges of hardware configurations you're likely to expect (e.g. IDE harddrives between 500 and 4000MB; video cards with no more than 4MB RAM) and set up your kickstarts accordingly. You could also set up a central file server (with quota) so that any document the end users wants preserved in case of a hardware failure on their end, will be. A central server with software updates, available to a pre-determined ranges of IP addresses, would provide your users with an easy way of keeping their machines up-to-date on all the latest ssl/ssh patches.

How many machines total are you talking about here? 100? 1,000? 10,000?

If you'd like to think about the RedHat path, I can point you to some pretty decent documentation which will take you through more details.

Sherloqq

One word - Knoppix

[gosand]

Check out Knoppix . Put in at least 128MB of memory (it runs on a ramdisk, ditch the hard drives, and boot them up on CDs. It comes with amazing auto-hardware-detection, and has Mozilla, OpenOffice, and many other programs. I use this currently on a discless machine to play MP3s through my stereo. It really is a nice distro. I think you can even mod the distro, but I haven't tried it yet.

locking down pcs

[Erpo]

These will be used solely for the purpose of web activities (surfing/mail), and word processing and *THATS IT*.

(emphasis mine)

It seems like your reason for locking these machines down is to prevent calls for technical assistance, but another possibility occurred to me. Some schools have policies saying that school computers and internet access are to be used for educational purposes only, and I thought yours might be trying to extend this to these school-manufactured computers. If this is the case, be aware (if you're not already, which you probably are) that there is no way to lock down a PC when someone else has unrestriced physical access no it (i.e. it is in their dorm room). You can't prevent someone from unplugging it, taking out the cmos battery for a few minutes, putting it back together, and installing their own linux distro (or windows 95) so they can play quake [II] with their buddies on the lan.

Other than that, just try out any of the excellent distros/configurations posted above, and make sure they have enough ram ;).

Old Hardware = FreeGeek

[matt_j_99]

Check out freegeek.org. They recycle old computers into useable ones with a variety of hardware... They have a distro called freekbox.

Choose Easy Restores

[omnirealm]

Create a prototype system with all the software packages necessary installed and configured. Then, dd the partition into an image file and burn it onto a CD.

Make sure that the user's home drive is network mounted via NFS.

If the user inadvertently breaks something, tell him to pop the restore CD in and reboot. Have a script dd the image back onto his hard disk partition. Ta-da!

This may be your path of least resistance.

Re:Knoppix -- bootable CD with Moz, Open Office, e

[bdr1]

For the Google impaired: http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Re:Important:

[Vinson Massif]

Lose the 'one-big-volume' syndrome. Create a /home partition, leave it untouched (except maybe for the .dot files) during a rescue. The user's data is untouched. Better yet, in this context, mount /usr ro, and (/tmp /home) noexec.

The Intel Dot.Station did this exactly

[Anonymous Coward]

They only allowed web. email, address book, note writing, printing. All using a home grown GUI on RedHat. Printers had to be USB. The clients were maintained from a server that could update drivers and software on the Dot.Stations.

Too bad this request didn't come in before Intel had to shut it down due to lack of demand for web appliances.

Computer Angels

[Craig Ringer]

I work with Computer Angels, a non-profit in Western Australia that do just that.

Take a look at our website for more info.

Pro Bono

[murcon]

What a marvelous idea. I hope your college will solicit students to do some of the work as a "giving back" to the community. They should also get in touch with local computer clubs, the Radio Shack/Best Buy/computer stores for spare parts contributions. Publicize the heck out of this as an effort to bring the entire community up to speed on computer skills. Think about what this does to the skill level of the local workforce!

Three cheers for your enlightened college. May I ask where you go to school?

Re:Knoppix -- bootable CD with Moz, Open Office, e

[Andrewkov]

Knoppix is a great idea, but it requires a lot of memory or else a hard drive with a swap partition, and the article mentioned older PC's. As long as there is swap, it will detect it automatically and start using it. FYI, Distrowatch is now tracking this distro: knoppix

Pee Wee Linux!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe no one has mentioned Pee Wee Linux.

It rocks!

Everything is run in a ramdisk, so you can really tell the hardware "hands off" of the permanent storage. With the addition of a simple watchdog timer you can have a system that resets itself in the event of any mucking.

Here's the link:

• http://www.peeweelinux.org/

wiping PCs

[Clover_Kicker]

>This kind of attitude really bugs me. I work in an
>IT department, and the attitude here is that the
>average worker's data is worthless. If the user
>messes up one little thing they just do a restore
>and wipe out everything. Thanks but no thanks.

That's why the IT department provides a server that users are supposed to save their data to.

Saving data to the server has several advantages, i.e. the data is backed up, and nothing is lost when something (inevitably) happens to the workstations.

You work in the IT department? Are you doing desktop support? Do you realize that troubleshooting a workstation can take days, but you could Ghost the same workstation and have the user back to work in less then an hour?

That's it huh?

[M.C. Hampster]

These will be used solely for the purpose of web activities (surfing/mail), and word processing and *THATS IT*.

Liar.

I don't know how many times I've heard someone say that a computer will only used for a particular purpose and then see it eventually be used for all sorts of things. When deciding which configuration you are going to use, I would keep this in mind.

If hardware changes than it's difficult

[krishnaD]

If there is lot of hardware change like display cards, network cards (as you are collecting and building) it will be difficult for setups. In suse you can create one selection disk and then replicate others over network. The network unattended installation can be done using various utilities. Look at replicator. For debain it's here http://packages.debian.org/unstable/admin/replicat or.html

good idea, not so good requirement.

[budalite]

If I understand the initial requirements right, these older PC's will be "supplied" (my quotes) to those unable to afford them. If so, I think you will find that having the university retain rights and/or ownership to the PC's introduces a couple of long-term pain-in-the-tail factors. The First pain factor would be the checking-in/ maintenance/ repair/ upkeep/logging in/out/checking-out process and warehousing of parts and machines. As one experienced in such a process, if you can just donate to needy users the machine donated to you (with some sort of checkout of the PC and briefing of the user), you will avoid *major* headaches, unless, of course, your goal is to learn and emulate the world of Help Desk Engineering. You would then have more time (and money!) to devote to the donees on the required/requested training on how to use (and, if asked, maybe, the configuration of) the machines and the applications. Just my 2 bits. Your school's idea is great and could even include non-technical departments in the training of the donees. (I am sure there is a better word than donee, but my brain is stuck.) I am sure the program will be greatly appreciated. Enjoy.

ps. This'll also let 'em tinker, which is how we all got where we are today. Ok, don't tell them that...it could be discouraging. :)

My suggestion is...

[tlambert]

My suggestion is... take off the rose-colored glasses.

If you put the hardware in the physical posession of the students, it's going to have all sorts of things done to it, no matter what you try to do to stop it.

I understand that the reason for this is to limit the support overhead, but you are not going to win, and if you go in with the assumption you are, you are going to get hurt much worse than if you don't.

-- Terry

Kawaii Linux URL?

[timothy]

A quick good search did not reveal anything -- do you have a project page somewhere?

timothy

Re:Kawaii Linux URL?

[MyHair]

A quick good search did not reveal anything

Read his post again. It's full of "will run"s "will be"s "the goal"s and "the target"s. This is vaporware/imagineware. It's a project with a vision but no product. I have tons of those myself, but I haven't named them all yet. :-)

Cool idea, though. Call us back when there's an alpha.

Re:Kawaii Linux URL?

[MsGeek]

No URL yet, sorry.

It's not quite at that stage yet...I will keep everyone posted. When the website's up there will be an announcement in my journal.

Call it vaporware if you must, but "trial balloon" is a more accurate word for my post. And my evil plan is working...I got two offers to alpha test in my email box this afternoon. ;-)

But this is VERY serious. The stories about computer waste being dumped on the 3rd World makes this very, very necessary.

Again, you can email me if you are interested in the project.

Re:Ghost - HELL NO!

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you have a bunch of disks that happen to be of different sizes, open up vi and edit the superblock directly.

Linux on old hardware?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a good intention, but I don't understand how you are going to run linux on old hardware. Linux is a beast. I don't care how many times people say it's fast, efficient, compact, whatever other buzzword. It is not. It is very, very slow. Consumes a massive amount of memory and a standard install of Red Hat is between 1 and 2 gigs. Most of which is useless. Around 20 ftp variants, 10 text editors, 5 text based browsers, and not a single good graphical one, which means you have to install Opera. Since the gui is based on the ancient X Windows system, it is horribly slow, even on a 2 GHz processor. It will be even slower on something older. Then there's always that 3 minute long period of continuous hard drive access that occurs every time about 5 minutes after your machine boots up. Have fun waiting for this to finish on an older 5400 (or slower) RPM drive. I would go with something more compact like windows 95 or 98, with appropriate patches installed.

Baloney

[eigerface]

1. String together randomly collected hardware.

2. Plug in randomly picked distro.

3. Configure X-Server.

4. Another lost weekend.

Cheers.

Alex

*BSD

[nurb432]

FreeBSD minimal installs are much easier/useable/smaller then many of the major linux distros, ( the ones that are going to be around a while.. at least ) and its hard to get much more secure then OpenBSD out of the box.

And soon MicroBSD will be useable by the masses..

Disclamer: I used to advocate Caldera.. but not anylonger.

Re:Important:

[AntiNorm]

Lose the 'one-big-volume' syndrome. Create a /home partition, leave it untouched (except maybe for the .dot files) during a rescue. The user's data is untouched. Better yet, in this context, mount /usr ro, and (/tmp /home) noexec.

A useful variant of this for home users, or college students like myself, is to create a large files partition to go along with your OS partition. Put all your work, homework, MP3, etc. files on it. Also, have an 'installfiles' folder on it in which you archive the installers for the programs that you use. This makes rescuing and/or reinstalling Windows much less painful; you lose very little data, if any, and you don't have to download everything again.

You know...

[Anonymous Coward]

If people can't pay their power bills, chances are that a computer won't do much for them...

Easy and hard

[shoppa]

As others have noted, making the only disk drive be a CD or booting over the net is a good way to dissuade tinkering/tampering.

But the problem becomes your wide range of hardware. Making a single custom distribution CD or a single network boot image that will work on all donated computers will be extremely difficult and time-consuming. At some point you'd probably decide to buy all-the-same $199 Wal-Mart PC's.

yellow pages and nfs...

[hatrisc]

why not setup an nfs server, and mount /home from that? then you could use something like ugh.. yellowpages for logins, etc. that way you don't have to worry about any body screwing around, since you can mount the rest of the system ro, and they will have their home directory which you could use perl scripts or something else to check disk usages and stuff.. and disable the accounts of offenders... it's not a simple solution, but it's one which would probably work out pretty well. the netbooting ideas are also a good thought.

DMS100 REDIRECT!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

So don't go there. Go to the original instead, if you must.

Use Knoppix.

[RealAlaskan]

Use Knoppix, or some other live-on-Cd distribution. Customize it to suit your needs (probably need to put the networking information on the CD, and a script to get it to automagically hook up to the network), then take out the HD and put in a second CD drive for the Knoppix CD. The second CD is optional, of course, but it would be nice.

This has the following advantages:
the users CAN'T mess it up beyond the power of a reboot to fix.
Upgrades are safe and easy: just hand out new CDs. Easy to implement, easy to roll back.
Even if the box gets cracked, it only stays cracked until the next boot.
Unlike the xterm/compute server solution (which I also like), this will work over a dialup line.

The two disadvantages I see would be that this will have to pause to read from the CD periodically, and it will take more RAM than a HD-based distribution. The first should be acceptable for this sort of use. The second could be ameliorated by leaving in the HD and using it for swap.

uhh.. wrong os/software

[jstepka]

...those who do not have a PC.

To me it sounds like they need to learn how to use the computer too.

Wouldn't it be in their best interest to learn something like Windows 95/98/ME? That way they will be well prepared when confronted with using a computer at a job or some other application?

In my mind the best thing you could do is teach someone to use Windows/Word/IE/Excel. In the end the machines will get trashed, why not setup a simple restore setup for each box?

My two cents...

Re:uhh.. wrong os/software

[rasterizerjay]

>In my mind the best thing you could do is teach someone to use Windows/Word/IE/Excel

And why is that? Aside from the general ridiculousness of that statement, I believe the point of this project is to provide computing resources for people at little to no cost (recycled hardware, no-cost software), so getting tangled in the M$ licensing disaster seems completely counter-productive.

My 2 cents

[Meaulnes]

I have read thru many of the comments, and a couple of people have mentioned the fact that in order to do a thin client solution, servers would be needed, whihc would add to the cost of this entire project. Personally, If I were heading up this kind of project, I would seriouisly consider using a CD based distro. Setup the entire hard-drive as swap, or Linux Terminal Services. Then for the server end, clustering a few few of the higher end machines.

superglue???

[stang7423]

just superglue the drive trays shut. Then there is no way for hte kids to get at the cd's.

Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[saitoh]

While I hadn't thought of that, its not possible for this. I tried to fit everything in a neat paragraph and neglected to mention that the machines will be shipped all over the state to non-students and students alike. Issues like modem/ethernet useage have come up, but thats about it so far.
Thanks for the idea though, it will help with the 10 or so we need to do on campus.

Page

Re:Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[Anonymous Coward]

Build out a distro to be as small as you can make it...Mozilla for internet/email and Open Office for word processing, plus whatever other tools you think are going to be needed. Write that to a bootable CD-R or CD-RW, and have the CD set up the mount points and /proc stuff in a ramdisk everytime it boots up. The amount of stuff you need will easily fit on one CD, so there's lots of room for many drivers for the various hardware pieces you're sure to have, so you won't need to change very much from box to box. The multi-user niceness of Unix isn't going to help you at all here.

Re:Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[dan the person]

I think you a dreaming if you expect people to run OpenOffice and mozilla on old machines.

Mozilla is just bearable on my K6-200 with 96Mb of ram. OpenOffice just crawls.

As much as i hate to use MS products, on p100 class machines win95+IE5.5+Office95 really is considerably more usable than the linux alternatives.

Newer versions of MS Office might be OK too, i dunno i haven't used windows much for many years.

Re:Not possible I'm afraid [Was Re:Client/Server]

[AvitarX]

For word prossessing in Linux, Abiword is the way to go. It is super cool, and really small. I would also suggest using knoppix as a starting point. It has all the driver stuff fairly worked out, and it automounts CDs (probably floppies too). For the word prossessing you need to add either a standard print driver already setup, so they can print. Or preconfigure AbiWord to save as rtf by default. The rtf's it puts out are sufficient for esseys, btu I don't know how well it can format them for formal papers. You probably could get a deal on printers from the vendor though. I bet those cheapy, 50.00 dollor printers, at office max could be gotten for free for a good cause (they really like more people buying ink).
as far as internet, you really can't configure that on a CD, so you would nead a small hard drive and an easy internet configuration tool. I would imagine a clean GUI over wvdial would work great, and be easily chopped together with expect and any random /TK language.

Spreadsheet?

[JstSumSchmuck]

I'd consider adding a spreadsheet program to the list of accessible software. I honestly can't imagine not having a spreadsheet to put ideas where I can look at them (monotonous calculations magically solved on the fly).
Old hardware rules out OpenOffice, but maybe something a little slimmer. Anybody know of a good "lightweight" spreadsheet? I guess it depends on what "old hardware" means too. PII's are probably "old" to some companies, and gnumeric or kspread would work fine.

images (re: distributions/configurations ...)

[spork5]

Take a look at some of the white papers out there on creating images for beowulf clusters. You could use the same concept to deploy a standard installation to a bunch of workstations. You would have the same software on all the boxes without having to perform a special install on each one. You can choose whichever distro you want based on your business needs. And, you could also slim down the kernel (since you said some of these machines were older) to improve performance without having to rebuild it after each install.

learn your lesson from these two

[Anonymous Coward]

first the gaming console: dedicate the hardware towards one thing only, gaming... this allows the software to be better targeted and in theory get more bang for the buck. Next, sell yourself on this while slowly evolving to include ever more PC functionality (like modular HW and SW changes, net connections, etc) Then soon you will have a system that costs about as much as a cheap PC, offers many of the same benefits while severely limiting the actual software being written for it.

Next we have the PC: be open to many things and tout this loudly. Extole your virtues as being modular and easily upgradable, yet every 1 year ensure that parts do not integrate at all and force people to upgrade the entire core set of hardware just for a new CPU, memory or interface change (like AGP for example). Since this happens so much you will not realistically be as modular as you want to be but you do however have a much broader range of software.

The point is, don't pidgeon hole yourself to the point that it is not worth it. PC's are horribly more expensive than consoles but they do much more... however if all you want is one or two things, then why should you pay for the biggest system? To me, the advantage of say... a dedicated VPN, NAT and firewall solution would be to have the option of putting ANY software on there I wanted and later maybe even adding a web server. But as a lesson once again from the console market proves, it is actually "easier" (very relative) to produce console games than PC games. YOu know what the hardware is for a console, you can only guess, assume and hope for certain configurations with PC hardware and lets face it! The touted Hardware Abstraction Layer, while a good idea in theory is simply not cutting it. Add the problems that Linux systems love to manifest and you end up with a frustrating reality that is very much NOT modular and interchangable as parts go.

Re:The correlation between annonymous coward and p

[Real World Stuff]

You continue to push the Italian BMT. For that, I will sample that sandwich this week. If I find it as pleasant as you express, you will be compensated with trashdot currency.

Linux is wrong way to go.

[foo fighter]

Given your new used computers are running at least a Pentium 133, have 64 MB RAM and a 2GB hard disk:

1. Pirate a copy of Windows 2000.
2. Install it on the first computer using the NTFS file system. Install your pirated copy of Office 2000.
3. Change the permissions on C:\, making sure permissions are inherited by child objects:
4. 
   
   • SYSTEM: Full Control
   • CREATOR OWNER: Full Control
   • Administrators: Full Control
   • Authenticated Users: Read & Execute, Read, List
   
   
   
5. Use Computer Management administration tool to create a new user who is a member of Users group. Use Users and Passwords control panel to automatically log that user into the system.
6. Use sysprep to image this disk to the rest of the computers.
7. Bonus points if you pirate Windows 2000 Server, set up a simple Active Directory, and control group policy for the systems from there.

Linux is horrible for centralized administration and locking down the desktop. My way you don't have to network anything which saves time and money. You don't have to worry about someone stealing the CD you are booting from. And since you are pirating the software Microsoft doesn't get any money.

Despite the naysayers, Windows 2000 runs great on a P133 with 64 megs o' ram, especially when all you are doing is word processing or surfing the Internet.

NIST has a great guide for securely configuring a Windows 2000 workstation. It takes you step by step through each of the items you will need to configure. If you want to get a bit more jiggy than my 6 point solution above, check this out: http://csrc.nist.gov/itsec/download_W2Kpro.html

what i've done

[b17bmbr]

in my classroom, i have several old p120's with 32MB. i have a p3 that i connect them to as clients and use a remote x session. that works great, but it sounds like you are not looking for a thin client solution. if however you do, an easy solution is install linux, any distro to the hard drive, and configure either /etc/inittab to start x, run level 5, and edit the last line so that it reads: /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query your.x.server or backup your /etc.rc.local file and make your new rc.local file say: /usr/X11R6/bin/X -query your.x.server it sounds as though these might be standalone boxen. For that I like IceWM. here's why: 1) looks like win95 2) low memory footprint 3) easy to configure as for 3, each distro (i use mandrake here) puts the coinfig files in a separate spot. but icewm has config files like toolbar and menubar, and are easy to config. and that is all they can get. keep root pwd away from them, and limit there apps to the toolbar. i.e. browser, editor, etc. it is a great solution and runs well on older pentium.

Yep Thats It [was Re:*THATS IT* ?]

[saitoh]

Yep, I just about can.

These are people who have never used a PC before, or if they have, never learned how to use windows. These aren't college students, but people who live in poor areas and dont have access to a machine currently. Thats why its just for web surfing and email (the word processing bit was thrown in in case we need to give some to students here, but I think the term idea up at the top which I replied to may fit that, but anyway).

These arent people who will develop, or need the terminal (or ever install anything). People like someone's grandmother, or an aunt who has never used a PC. 10;1 says that if I did a background that had a fake startbar at the bottom, it would never register that they werent using Windows9x. Not stupid people, just technically illiterate.

The Arusha Project

[gec03]

Perhaps you can use Ark/Arusha to configure all the machines and provide network based reconfiguration if it all goes tits-up.

Ark is supposed to be cross platform - but it's a while since I've heard anything.

Check it out
http://ark.sourceforge.net/

Re:Knoppix -- bootable CD with Moz, Open Office, e

[pben]

There seem to be a lot of thse CD distributions the best list I found is at CD-based A cd based distribution does sound the way to go if you have a CD-ROM, CD-ROMs are cheap to add if you don't have one.

Getntoo Sounds perfect

[Anonymous Coward]

You can install the Gentoo system from the stage 1 tarball and then install only the necessary apps like Moz and OO(and maybe GAIM---gotta give the users something to cheer abt). Alternatively, as someone suggested, you can use bootp and DHCP to make diskless machines boot of the network and have a thin client provide office/internet services to all users. In this way, if u change some setup, (like chage the IP for a networked printer) only the boot server has to be modified(which saves me a lot of trouble where i work). This approach also allows you to make the computer password protected for everyone who logs in, allowig you to setup common unix priviledges for files/apps etc.
Just my 2 cents.
Orca

RULE Project

[negyvenot]

The Rule Project is what you are looking for. It is based on standard Red Hat installation media. It uses a modified installer (anaconda) to install Red Hat on low end hardware. The project members are already in discussion with Red Hat to get support for their project (ie to integrate their changes into standard Red Hat). It was quite a few months a last saw the project, but that time they were very active.

I need an update...

[Anonymous Coward]

...on the status of American icon Steven King. Is he alive or did he die in his Maine home recently at age 34?

reply to distribution/configuration

[Anonymous Coward]

Slack 8.0, 2.4.5 kernel, XFree86 3.3.6, Xfce 3.8.16, Abiword and DHCP. Under 400Mb total.

LMAO

[b17bmbr]

you forgot one thing: establish net connection and download kazaa, then leech some warezed games from an 37337 haXor, to pass the time away.

Where is the download page

[pardasaniman]

I sure hope you've got one. Where is the FTP? I sure hope you are honouring the millions of developers who helped build the core of that distro for no money.

IIS

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know wher to download this Please reply

A good choice...

[MQBS]

The FreeBSD LiveCD Project is your friend. I've used the CD linux distros and... nyehhh. None of them have the wholesomeness of the LiveCD project. Your only concern is if the machines involved will do Non-Emulation booting, or even CD booting at all. If you can't do non-emulation booting, your best bet is to set up a floppy-boot system that either reads data (bins, configs) from the cd or else off of the internet (if the people involved have high speed connections.) Ignore the ideas about BOOTP and network booting; no router worth its salt will route BOOTP over the Internet.

Corel Linux

[vertical_98]

Version 1.2 of Corel is VERY useable, plus without the root password, you can only change the appearance in the GUI. Not sure if you are giving this out to students or other people. Personally, I really like it as a desktop linux, even if it old. (based on Debian Slink)

Vertical

What was that about FreeBSD?

[Empty Threats]

FreeBSD doesn't have Perl in base either, jackass.
Look before you leap to criticise.

Re:What was that about FreeBSD?

[dan the person]

Mandrake doesn't have perl in it's base either.

It's minimum install is 60Mb.

redhat

[reactor]

I think there are some responses in the same vein, but I thought I would relate my own experience.

I was put in charge of setting up web kiosks at my university. We ended up using Redhat because of its package system. I believe it was called "kickstart". I am not a huge fan of Redhat in general and I know there are other distributions with simial features, but Redhat's kickstart is a pretty cool system. Basically, we created a floppy that specified which packages we wanted. We kept these packages on an ftp server with some scripts that were run to configure the machine after the packages were installed. Anytime the hard drive became corrupted or whatever, you would just boot the machine with the floppy in it and get a fresh install.

I don't remember all the configuration stuff we did, but I am sure you can find some good information on the web. Basically, the initab spawned the X server so it was always up. We used fvwm as a window manager because most people are familiar with a Windows 9x interface. There was a shortcut on the desktop to kill the X server if it was becoming messed up and it would just respawn.

Only a few dirs were writeable, such as netscape cache dirs and the like. Umm..that's all I can remember right now. It wasn't the most secure thing in the world, but we never experienced any problems.

Radmind seems ideal for this.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.radmind.org

Radmind was designed with this sort of administration in mind.

Re:Red Hat

[jroysdon]

If you're looking at RedHat and old hardware, you should look at the RULE (Run Up2date Linux Everywhere) project.

You can achieve a very limited install, but still get and keep up to date software.

OpenBSD or NetBSD

[marcellomorsello]

Give OpenBSD a try.

Performs very well on old and stripped down hardware, has a simple and quick instalation and the best documentation available on open systems. Take a look on their FAQ

NetBSD has more aplications available and can be installed
in many hardwares with very tiny disks, but I personally prefer OpenBSD.

Re:Ghost - HELL NO! dd, hell slow!

[vertical_98]

This is the stupid newbie of the month question.

Could you go into more detail or point to a HOWTO? I have several compaq deskpros that I want to make into X-Terminals and would like find a better way to mirror them. Ghost works, but isn't very friendly with ext2.

Vertical

Giving the gift of connectivity

[PleaseDontBeTaken]

I'd also like to get involved in giving the gift of connectivity to people who otherwise might not receive it until much later. I've now brought a few old laptops ($100 ebay stuff) back to life on Linux and wouldn't say I've gotten the hang of it, but I am getting better.

First I'll bring up a few issues/problems, then offer a idea or two in return for being such a whiner.

1) Businesses are probably the best source for equipment because they upgrade more frequently and one "call" nets you 40 computers instead of one.. But most probably already do something with the computers and those that do have to 'change' what they are doing, which involves getting someone to say yes. This problem is solvable with a good sales pitch to someone who can say, "Yes."

2) It means almost nothing (these days) if the people who receive the computer can't get online, and that costs money -- $100-$120 a year at a minimum for dialup if you can't cut a discount. It would be nice if people could use all those free AOL disks, but that's a nonstarter for Linux and not sustainable anyway.

3) The time involved to setup an arbitrary computer is non-trivial. Big packages like SuSE have good autodetect but take manual effort each time. Debian is _much_ easier to maintain but setting up X was more challenging I thought. (Worth saying again -- Debian is much easier to maintain, especially if you want to add something that wasn't on the original distro setup disk.)

4) As you do volume, you need a lot of space to keep the equipment. Many eligible businesses are in cities, as are many needy donors, and that's where space is most expensive.

5) Training is a major component of computer cost. It's even more important if the computer donation is going to end up being 'fire and forget' in many cases. The best kind of training would be with the family, in the home, with scheduled follow ups. A major element of training would be to help make sure people could at least access the charity help page (with email submission form). It should also include basic printed materials. Capt Drunken Bum, how did you go about this?

6) The people who get the computer still need to do some setup, and going from no computer to *nix can't be easy. This could be somewhat mitigated if part of the script involved setting up for the person or family for whom the computer is intended, and presetting the dial-in numbers for whatever is the preferred internet service provider.

Okay, issue #6 had an idea crammed in there. Now a couple ideas without bring up problems:

1) It's always feels good to do things for yourself, but organizations like the Salvation Army have been performing this service for the needy for a long time. Rather than going it alone, it might be better to get them involved, if they are not already.

2) If you want something from people, the best way is of course to offer them something in return. Most people giving away computers don't want them anyway, but would like the tax deduction if it weren't the pain to get the substantiation. This goes for businesses, too. Providing a web service that estimates values for trade in computer based on the obvious components, then guides people into sending their computer in (or delivering it, if appropriate) is exactly that sort of service. They get the estimated value, register to send in their computer and get a computer id, and when the computer is received, they get a substantiation letter (to the extent it checks out). If a business is willing to donate more than N computers, it would be reasonable to have the charity perform the valuation for them rather than requiring them to do it all themselves. (Worth it for the volume.)

-B
---------------------

You don't need to provide downloads of Linux

[0x0d0a]

The GPL says that if you give someone a binary copy of a program, you need to also provide source upon request, at no more than a reasonable packaging fee.

There is absolutely no requirement to make a distro of Linux downloadable -- as a matter of fact, I believe SuSE does *not* let people download CD images (or at least they have a major lag time between shelf releases and ISO releases).

The *only* requirement is that if someone purchases a copy of your Linux distro *and* if they ask for a copy of the source, you have to get them a copy of your source at a low price. That's it. You can sell source CDs instead of allowing downloads if you want.

Remember, Linux is free as in speech. Any beer freeness is incidental.

FREEGEEK.org

[desierto]

Take a look at the freegeek.org site, look what they have done. They use Mandrake, but if you get the recepient of the computer actively involved in the refurbishing/recycling process, 1 they are going to learn something, 2 they may want to take better care of there box since they helped build it. I don't think a lock down is the answer and I don't think problems are avoidable. What you can do is use the problems encountered as teaching opportunities. Tons o web browsers out there galeon, mozilla, konqueror I use regularly, we all know this. I make the fliers for my LUG w/ openoffice.org software.

CMOS Battery?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why take that out to flash the CMOS? That can take up to 15 minutes. There is a little jumper you can short on most mobos these days that will reset the CMOS. Just short it, it will tell you to restart, you unshort it, and bingo, bye bye CMOS.

Your solution is here.

[chakradeo]

http://www.emergic.com/


# Provides a full suite of desktop applications, including email, browser, Office suite, instant messenger, calendar, contacts and more.
# Reduces desktop software costs, by eliminating the need for expensive proprietary software.
# Eliminates virus risk, since Linux is the underlying environment.

# Offers a Windows-like graphical desktop, for ease of use.
# Reads and writes MS-Office file formats (DOC, XLS and PPT files).
# Runs DOS applications, through a DOS emulator.
# Supports specialised Windows applications, through add-on software.

# Reduces desktop hardware costs, via re-use of existing PCs or purchase of new, low-cost computers.
# Enhances performance of older hardware, due to server-based computing and storage.
# Eliminates desktop hardware upgrades, since all computing is on the server.

# Centralises Administration, via the server through a web-based front-end.
# Simplifies software upgrades, since only the server needs to be updated.
# Allows sharing of computers, with privacy of data for each user.

Emergic Freedom - Thin Client Desktop

Minimum Requirements
Any Pentium-class CPU. Hard disk and CD-ROM not needed. Only needs 16 MB RAM, 100 Mbps Network Card, Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor. Indicative Market Price: Rs 7,000+ (USD 140)

Applications
Email Client, Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Web Browser, Office Productivity Suite (including Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation applications), Instant Messaging, Image Editor / Viewer, PDF Reader, File Manager, Printing, Network Neighbourhood, Calculator, Games, Local Peripheral and Multimedia Support [Screen Shots]

Emergic Freedom - Thick Server OS

Recommended Configuration (for 40 users)
1 GHz Dual CPU, 1.5 GB RAM, Two 80 GB hard disks, 100 Mbps Network Card. Indicative Market Price: Rs 70,000+ (USD 1,400)

Applications
File Server, Print Server, Software RAID (disk mirroring), User Management, Client / Desktop Management, DOS Emulator, Windows Application Support (optional)

Also See:
- How Emergic Freedom reduces cost (by 75%)

- Emergic Freedom White Paper (on Thin Client-Thick Server Computing)

- Emergic Freedom Q&A

- Rajesh Jain's blog (on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets)

- Emergic Vision (from Rajesh's blog)

Re:Your solution is here.

[chakradeo]

Last links are corrected here:
- How Emergic Freedom reduces cost (by 75%)

- Emergic Freedom White Paper (on Thin Client-Thick Server Computing)

- Emergic Freedom Q&A

- Rajesh Jain's blog (on Emerging Technologies, Enterprises and Markets)

- Emergic Vision (from Rajesh's blog)