CS and Nick already made most of the points, so not much left to say. > Lucent should be swapped for an external modem, shouldn't it?
No, you'd need to be as cheap as possible. Of all the lose^H^H^Hwinmodems supported, lucent has been by far the best choice over the years. Conexant is well supported but the driver is US$30 (i.e. more than the modem card), Intel (536eh etc) support is patchy. There are plenty of cheap lucent-based cards, all seem to work, for how long depends more on the manufacturer of the card than on the manufacturer of the chipset. There are lucent venus chips which implement the equivalent of a real serial port, and therefore can be viewed as hardmodems. Unfortunately, none have ever been sighted for sale in New Zealand. Yuri here managed to buy one second hand once, but you need a) new ones, b) reliability of supply. If you do track down both, please make sure you post on this list!! > What distro? Xandros for CD writing? Not wanting to start a war, but you'd prob best stick with a popular one if you want to help people. That kinda rules out Xandros as far as I can see. You'd also need to make sure you don't supply people with "and to re-install your OS, just download these 2 gigabyte over the 'net on your dialup" type distro. I.e., you'd have to supply installation media. I'd vote for SuSE, but there wouldn't be many people here saying I'm not biased ;) (I think I'll try 9.2 tomorrow... [1]) If you wanted the hardware to be forward-pointing, supply a dvdrom drive. Those extra $20 or so are a must if it was my decision. > > I expect that a printer, a sound card, and speakers will be what the > customers want in the basic package. What else? > A USB hard drive > for backups? No, they can be a royal PITA to make work reliably. Most(?) caddies (or whatever you want to call those boxes with power supply and USB<->IDE converter) are not too good under Linux. Of course you could pick carefully, but I'd stick with CD/DVD burners. CD burners cost an extra $30 or so as dvdrom-combo. > Are floppies dead yet? Not quite, esp if you want to do some hardware tricks like flashing bios, but for your clientele the answer is yes. Supply a small keychain gadget, which will not only look heaps more sexy to your customers but also be more useful these days. > Should we point our dozens - nay, hundreds - of users towards CLUG or > sign them up with, say, MandrakeUsers? The average user won't need > CLUG. The intelligent, adventurous command-line user will. Point those to CLUG, preferably in a way which implies that CLUG is happy to help with Linux problems but not so much with how to turn the computer on. Alternatively, and probably better, set up your own list. You should also mention the distro's specific lists, but obviously this depends on your choice of distro. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
