Re: [school-discuss] Slaves to Microsoft

[Daniel Howard <dhhoward@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joel Kahn wrote:
 > There is one thing that I think would be helpful: if
> someone out there in schoolforge land could sell me
> cheaply (or donate) a laptop preloaded with a nice
> stable Linux distro and equally stable versions of the
> relevant apps. I'm not interested in raw power; in
> fact, an older machine might even be a more impressive
> way to demonstrate that Linux can do a better job than
> Windows under the right conditions. With a laptop, I
> would have a lot more flexibility in my own
> self-training with FLOSS, as well as what I show,
> where/when I show it, and who I show it to.

Joel, here's an idea: go to your local cheapie computer store that 
carries refurb/previously owned PCs, and purchase two boxes: one server 
and one or two clients.  The server should be at least Pentium III with 
a GByte of RAM (you might need to buy a faster hard disk drive), and the 
clients can be PII 300 MHz or above.  Buy another NIC for the server so 
it has two.  Cost of server will be on the order of $100-$150 and the 
clients will be on the order of $50.  If you have any ancient PCs at 
home for the kids running Win95/98, they'll do fine.  If you can take 
one or two of the classroom PCs from your school, that's even better. 
Load the K12LTSP package on the server and show them how well the older 
classroom PCs work as clients.  We did this and used a classroom PC that 
was dead in the water (HDD was dead, but with a NIC that was 
net-bootable) to show our principal how we could take the older 
classroom PCs and breathe new life into them at little to no cost.

They really need to see how it works to believe it.  We also showed the 
district IT folks how it takes 90 minutes to install the K12LTSP package 
on a server, and how user-friendly it was.

Regards,
Daniel