Adopt a KDE Geek

sultanoslack writes "In an effort to bring together KDE hackers that are students, unemployed or by other means lacking in hardware and capital with users in that have spare goodies, Adopt-a-Geek has been launched. More details are available on how to help out. Been wondering what you can do to help out? Here's your chance!"

Comments

Do I get a framed picture of my geek?

[Harald Paulsen]

Do I get some pictures I can put in my wallet, and a certificate telling me where he lives, where he goes to school etc. Then I could flash his picture whenever people tell me how they have adopted some poor kid in the 3rd world.

Aaaaw, look at that.. not-so-cute geek!

Re:Do I get a framed picture of my geek?

[pizza_milkshake]

yeah, i think i'd skip the picture... ;)

A little more information

[Anonymous Coward]

From the Relevant Page:

KDE developers put their computers through a lot of work. Building KDE on my modern desktop (1.4 GHz Athlon, 512 MB RAM) takes 6-8 hours. Many developers are working on systems which cannot fully build KDE in under 24 hours, and many KDE developers do so several times a week. Profiling and debugging tools for optimizing code are very processor and memory intensive. Hardware often is a bottleneck to KDE developers' productivity.

So keep this in mind before you ask why they're requesting this. Thanks :).

My geek...

[LucidityZero]

My geek can program in C/C++, Java, Perl AND LISP.

And he's captain of the chess club!

I'm so proud of my adopted geek! :D

All very good i'm sure

[Suchetha]

But if you *really* want to help out.. why not get in touch with some of the organisations that rebuild old computers to ship them to developing countries (with Linux as the running OS)..

i belive techsoup.org has a list of organisations near you

Suchetha

TV Commericals

[johnraphone]

How long till we see the commericals? I know thier coming.... For only a stick of memory a day, you too can help a KDE geek!

We need this!

[falonaj]

The idea might seems quite funny to at first glance, but it actually makes sense.

I am involved in KDE (maintainership of one of the web sites), and I know of cases where lack of hardware has indeed prevented people from working on very interesting projects. It is not only about the speed of compilation, it is also about disc space. This is especially true for projects dealing with Gnome interoperability, as this sometimes requires to compile _two_ huge desktops from source.

Of course, lack of hardware will not stop things forever - other geeks or some distribution will step in eventually - but it has slowed down interoperability effords.

Adversity

[realnowhereman]

During my formative years as a geek I (as I'm sure many of you did) had to make do with whatever was available. Although being pampered and showered with cool gear would have been nice, my lack of up-to-the-minute equipment did not damage me - in fact, I would go as far as saying that my abilities to fix equipment in the middle of a field come directly from those early days and put me and my skills in demand today.

The reason the requirements for Windows keep increasing and increasing, every release requiring the most modern hardware is because the developers all have modern hardware and don't see it as a problem to make full use of it. (Games are even more of a culprit here, but that's a little more forgiveable)

Whatever hardware the developers have is what the hardware requirements will be in the end; if that is a gameboy and a piece of string then so much the better for the project.