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How Can I Donate Old Hardware to Developers?
olddoc asks: "I have a computer I'd like to get rid of. It is still pretty useful for a developer, being a fairly powerful dual Athlon MP box, but there is no Microsoft OS on it so most charities in the area don't want it. I live in Eastern Pennsylvania, USA and I'm sure there are dozens of people who are developing GPL or BSD licensed software, who would be happy to get their hands on it. If my old computer is used to help develop free software, I'll get all warm and fuzzy inside. If I get a tax deduction for it so much the better. Does anyone know how to give a worthy project a hardware gift?"
Conctact some projects you deem worthy of recieving the box. Since shipping is impractical unless they feel like dropping the money, you should try to find someone in a reasonably close area (you mentioned Peensylvania, shoudn't be a big prob) that would be willing to pick it up. I know I wouldn't mind a few hours of drive time for a box, especially something like yours that isnt a piece of junk.
Find the email address to a local LUG listserv and let them know the stats of the machine and that it's free!
assert(expired(knowledge));
How about posting on a bulletin board at a local college or university?
"All I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power." - Ashleigh Brilliant
Just don't forget to uuencode it.
Hosting 20G hd, 1Tb bw! ssh $7.95
I would love to have a dual Athlon MP box. How about giving it to an assistant professor that has no research money to build any kind of decent computer with? I could definitely put this machine to good use.
Please contact me: katamai@hotmail.com
I will be able to pay you for the cost of shipping it.
You can jsut send it to me.
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Or is it only an Oregon Phenomenon? http://www.freegeek.org/, for anybody in the Portland Metro
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
there's one for Philly.
Who's your user, program?
Freecycle.org, i think.
And they accept donated hardware. FreeBSD is one:
http://www.freebsd.org/donations/
You can get a tax deductionn too.
I'm currently working on a few projects that will be released as OSS once done. I could use the machine as a development box or as a server to host the project once everything is ready, it could also help in terms of running virtual machines so I can test the software on different operating systems without having to reformat/switch machines. If you are interested, I can pay the shipping. Just reply to this message or email me: pursini {@} gmail.com
Sig: I stole this sig.
Go to KDE-Artists and see if there is anyone there that might need it.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
photar at gmail DOT com
He who knows not and knows he knows not is a wise man. He who knows not and knows not he knows not is a fool.
The hardest part won't be giving it away. The hardest part will be finding someone that will actually put it to good use. I mean, if you just take every request at face value, a lot of them are probably just nobodies who want a free SMP system. (I know this, because I pondered the same thing for a nanosecond or two.)
What you ought to do is find an active open source project where developer access to an SMP system would be useful. Good candidates are the Linux kernel and the BSD's, as well as number-crunching, desktop environments, and multimedia applications. Perferably it should be a project who's work you admire or use on a daily basis. Join their mailing list, lurk for awhile, and try to figure out who's who. Then post your offer to one of their mailing lists. Then and only then, offer your system to someone who you know to be a proven member of the community that has contributed a significant amount of code in the past and will likely continue to do so in the future.
This is probably the best way to ensure that your gift ends up in the right hands.
... to the Mepis guys in Morgantown, WV. Goto www.mepis.org and see if they are asking for donations. If they are (and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg to ship or live relatively close to the PA-WV state line) then go for it. Ruling them out, I'm sure there is a LUG or many a user group in your area that could put it to good use. As far as a tax break goes, I still think Mepis may be a good bet.
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I'm not really a professor, I just want to be able to open four high resolution porn movies at once whilst playing half life 2 on my other monitor. I am a bad bad man :(
Id try posting an article on Ask Slashdot, and announce which city I live in, and then read the comments for people who would pick it up.
Seriously who is in a LUG anymore? Linux is mainstream now. Its no longer about 'hey we're cool we use Linux', people everywhere use Linux, sometimes without even knowing it.
Do LUGs include people who use Linksys routers?
Linux developers OTOH frequently also develop on Win32, Solaris, BSD and other stuff
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I'm a Computer Engineering student, and I'd be interested in this box you want to donate. I'll pay shipping (I live in Southern California). Shoot me an email.
I can't say that I'm going to be doing a whole lot of developing, but I run a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and I can use anything I can get my hands on. I have an intranet and portal to set up and several small database apps to write.
Even though they make things fairly reasonable price-wise, there will be no Microsoft software in our organization. Everything is GPL F/OSS.
We rehabilitate raptors (birds of prey, not dinosaurs) and do conservation education outreach.
I can give you a nice, muchly grateful letter to pass along to the IRS....
I'm in the process of building an open source desk and I need one more computer to complete my setup. Anyone who sits in the chair will be free to use it, and by sitting in the desk, this applies to your computer as well. Think about it - by donating the computer to me, you could potentially be helping out tens of people. And, technically, seeing as how I'm ordained in the Unitarian Church, it could be seen as tax deductable.
Ebay it cheap and donate the Proceeds...
The GPL, for those that truely understand.
If I were you then I would contact Theo to see how you can get the box to a developer. By the way, no matter who you end up donating it to, it's an awesome gesture on your part. Good on ya.
Give it to RedHat - they obviously need one.
They released some VERY buggy SMP kernels over the weekend. Both FC3 and FC4 are horribly affected.
Friends and I have had to revert back to the older kernels as most (all?) dual-proc or hyperthread systems would panic on boot!
There are dozens of complaints and unanswered questions on fedoraforum. They must not have tested them under a dual-proc system at all.
The most amazing part is, they haven't released a new SMP kernel to fix the problem yet! (these came out 6 days ago)
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
If you live in Eastern PA you know as well as I do that the Philly school district is underfunded and poor childeren have little technology in the schools.
I'm a developer and I often use Meld, a diff/merge tool. I also am an avid vim user. So every now and then I donate a few bucks to these worthy projects.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I think the people who find they have the least problems are those who find the time to test earlier in the cycle. If everyone is too scared/lazy to test the prerelease kernels on their hardware then this is the end result. Want to stop it happening? Get involved and give feedback in the early stages.
I've built a media database for a customer where you drop originals in a folder to be converted to different sizes/formats for web/print and indexed in a database.
.bat-files) would do.
The script is written in VBScript to script ImageMagick to process the images but a combination of ImageMagick and any scripting language (even
ImageMagick is quite powerful and really easy to work with so you can whip up really neat things in notime.
OSS projects are normally looking for machines to do work on. Debian has a page:
http://www.us.debian.org/donations
As a side note, ESR lives in the philly area I believe, maybe he could help you.
Damn, I need more coffee. I read the headline as "How can I detonate old hardware...".
I think that's the model - a DEC MIPS r3000 (I believe) that runs ultrix 4.2a and also netbsd.
I'm getting ready to move to a new apartment and this thing has been sitting here unused for some 10 yrs now! anyone want one? it has 'full' memory in it (48meg, I think?) and a 1gig drive with ultrix preloaded. I might even have the ultrix cdroms and cdrom reader, too (DECs weird caddy version).
probably too expensive to ship (I have the 16" display for it too). located in mtn view, ca.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Gentoo, for one, takes hardware donations. The donated hardware could become any number of things, from a new bittorrent server, to a developer's workstation. Another thing we offer is online developer machines, which gives remote access to the machines for developers in need. I am sure that Gentoo is not the only project out there with a similar way of handling donations. I know that FreeBSD has their own donations page. Pretty much any community-based project will gladly take your donation and put it to good use. In fact, it might be easier to find a project you would like to donate it to, rather than an individual. The project would probably do a better job of finding your machine a good home within its own structure than you probably would be able to without being intimately familiar with who does what and who needs what within the project.
Man I gotta upgrade...
You don't have to 'give' the box to anyone to put it to good use.
Drop the distributed computing project of your choice on it, hook up a wireless networking card to it and store it somewhere out of the way.
There are lots of worthy DC projects out there.
I leave my PC on 24/7 crunching numbers folding and I know my electric bill is about $25 more then it could be if I was turning my PC off every month. I am considering that my contribution to charity.
Just a thought.
Donating a rig to a charity is a wonderful thing to do.