I'm faced with a problem that I'm sure some geeks would love to have, or
rather, I've come to the conclusion that no one else is dealing with it
and that if it's going to be dealt with, I've got to do it.
You the man, Larry!
Those of you who came to the meetings at efn this summer may remember
catching a glimpse of the back room with piles of components stcked over
and under and around boxes of loose power cables and IDE ribbons.
Looks like my garage, only smaller.
I did a fairly rough census of this junk pile and figure that there's
somewhere between 25-30 computers worth of stuff in there.
Can we link them into a SuperComputer? Let's use Turbo-Linux
Computers built out of OPN/EFN stocks will be given to other Nonprofit
Orgainzations and put to socially useful purposes. So this is not an open
invitation to cherry pick old pentiums ;-)
I'm so sad )-;
I'm looking for advice on how to systematically test components and also
looking for volunteers who might be willing to give up part or all of a
weekend in the second half of November to help me and several other
volunteers blitz the job in a systematic way.
Clink-clank-clunk - Pentium 100 - clink-clank-clunk - Pentium 90
At least some of them will be going towards being public access terminals
at shelters and recovery centers and as office utilities (file and
printing) for various nonprofit organizations. And of course they'll all
be running Linux :-)
See comment above about Turbo-Linux
Email me with suggestions as to how to test dozens of hard drives, cd
drives, network cards and antiquated printers.
Call around to local computer retailers and see if anyone has an ide drive tester, That would make short work of the drives. I have only seen ONE network card go bad. That's probably not a problem. Printers can be self-tested if you get the model numbers and do some research the start-up sequence needed. CD drives are going to be a pain to test.
If you're interested in volunteering.
Good luck. Depending on the weekend, I can probably spend Saturday helping install and put together machines.
Regards, Jim Darrough
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