[NTLUG:Discuss] Placing out feelers

[Andrew Brown]

Now on the Novell front. Who would I contact in regards to some funding? I 
have a few charity groups we could use as a stable relationship middleman 
that would give Novell the confidence and the "write off" they would 
appreciate. Again I am in the process of marshaling the resources right now 
so whatever info is a help!

The group that I think is the best target is families with school age 
children. System use would be document production and internet/email. Music 
and video possibly like said earlier, educational materials. 

I am thinking about calling the Department of Education to see what programs 
or assistance they have especially since they are following their Open Source 
initiatives. There might be some additional help in that regard.

On any event the best way is start small, plan for success and have fun... 
that's what Linux is any way! 

AB

On Thursday 23 June 2005 6:24 pm, Ralph Green, Jr. wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 17:10 -0500, Andrew Brown wrote:
> > Any recc'd on system min's to set up front? Which distro to use? I use
> > fedora and Suse. Fedora is ok but does need some plugin's to get it
> > really good. Suse comes with most the bells and whistles... any
> > recc'd?!?!
>
>   I think just about any Pentium or better with sufficient memory can be
> useful.  I think I would pass on 486 systems.  Now, you get to think
> about useful.  A P90 with 256 meg is much better than nothing, but I
> would not give it to anyone.  It might be better purposed as a firewall,
> media server, or just used by a patient person who only want to do
> email.  For an average user, I'd say a P2/300, or K6/500 is ok for
> surfing and answering email.  Either one would be very marginal for
> playing downloaded videos.  I don't mean music videos, although some
> would care about that.  If kids are to get these, they will want to play
> a variety of educational videos.  You want to get up to about a P3/500
> for that to be smooth.  If you can handle using judgement to see who
> gets what machine, then take any Pentium to start with.  Otherwise, set
> the minimum at about a P3/500 with 256 meg ram and a 4 gig hard drive.
>
>  Plan on using a bunch of hard drives.  They will have failed in many
> old systems and some people will destroy the old drive before giving the
> systems away.  Consider using SCSI.  It is not that these users need
> SCSI, but there are a lot of used 4 to 18 gig scsi drives to be had
> cheap.  Find a few basic LSI, BusLogic, or Adaptec PCI SCSI controllers
> and you can use them.  The controllers are cheap, too and I think I
> would trust giving a 4 gig SCSI drive over a 4 gig IDE drive.
>
> > and don't start a distro flame war over the distros please hahaha!
>
>   Surely, you jest.  That is part of the fun.  I would probably pick
> Xandros OCE or Ubuntu, since I expect many of the recipients will be
> inexperienced.  SuSE is nice and if Novell helps fund this, then I would
> suggest thinking about SuSE.
>
>
>
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