ubuntu-us-ma Community Action: Report

[Martin Owens]

Hello all,

This report is just a heads up and what's going on with the Condon
Community Center (200 D St)

With the man who runs the computer lab (Nicholas Katsirubas), we have
been going through the lab in a practical lesson in the basics of
networking and systems administration.

The lab was heavily broken in the networking department and I have
convinced him to run the server (completely broken prior) on Ubuntu,
this will manage the printing and file sharing and for now the internal
lan routing and dns proxy.

Most of the desktops are IBM Pentium 4 computers, with 256MB of RAM (12
of them) and a few are very old celerons with 128MB of RAM. I'll be
working to see if I can upgrade them bit by bit to 512MB of RAM.
Fortunately they all have one 256MB stick, ex-DMC computers. and what's
cool is that they all support PXE booting.

They all run Windows XP, apart from the celeron that runs Windows ME.
The majority of the programs are old DOS games which Nick has gathered
up over time.

I've encouraged Nick to look through the repository of games and
educational software. I can see how useful all these tools would be, in
this kind of computer lab, and getting the desktops duel booting with
Ubuntu would open the doors to many of these tools.

Best Regards, Martin Owens