[Gllug] London councils and Unix/Linux

[Jim Bailey]

Hi,

On Thursday, January 10, 2002, at 07:06 PM, gllug at uncertainty.org.uk wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 02:47:51PM -0000, Jackson, Harry wrote:
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: jim at lateral.net [mailto:jim at lateral.net]
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> I don't know if anyone caught the bbc 10 oclock news last
>>> night the gov
>>> unveiled it new plan for super IT schools and a school sent a tape in
>>> showing the state of there IT dept. Most distressing was the
>>> room full of
>>> old PCs donated and bought that were just sitting there doing nothing
>>> bcause the school had no where to put them.  Volunteers anyone.
>>
>> I would say that now days it is probably as much as a problem getting the
>> secure room as the Hardware. I would hate to build an IT suite to see it
>> half inched. I would have no qualms helping someone fit a room full of
>> hardware or helping provide it but I get extremely frustrated by the red
>> tape to get the stuff. My mate helped fit out his wife's school (she's a
>> teacher) and was lucky enough to have people interested in doing it. I 
>> know
>> its the children we are trying to help but as John has said if I got no
>> enthusiasm from the teachers quarter then I would be a bit disillusioned 
>> by
>> the whole "help the schools ethos".
>>
>
> How feasable is it to set up a system based on a couple of nice servers
> (locked securely) and running a bunch of very cheap X-client machines in
> the classroom.

Not that difficult Diskless nodes Howto spring to mind
>
> Now I know that people will nick pretty much anything - but could these
> classroom machines be low enough spec that school security would be
> adequate (and still good enough to work on) ?

Not absolutely sure but I know a lot of old machines have 1,2 and 4 meg 
graphics using system Ram.  8 and 16mb graphics cards can be bought for as 
little as £15 from computer fairs and mail order which should be able to 
handle things like the KDE desktop.  I personally use an 8mb AGP ATI card 
which runs KDE 2.2 without any problems, though admittedly I have a Duron 
650 cpu.
>
There are a lot of things that could be done again volunteers anyone.

Peace Jim


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