Computers give away

With the temporary demise of the Computer Courses at the ECC, the Lab has had quite a few computers waiting to get refurbished, fixed up and given away; some volunteers have been busy making them work again.

The last couple of weeks we have been giving away some to local people who can plead a good case. Local artists, single parents and the people Rich has met down the pub that are digitally challenged! 🙂

We install the Debian-based Mepis operating system . We set the machines with a KDE Desktop environment, this is one of the easiest desktops to get use to. Mepis provides a Graphic User Interface (GUI) to configure the system and it works very well on the 450mhz machines with 128mhz ram, including Open Office, the Mozilla Browser Suite and the Gimp (Professional Graphics Package). We are still unable to supply wireless cards but they have configured network cards so if the recipient is in range of a signal the they can buy an access point an hook it up to that.

If you know of anyone working in a project that needs a computer for home or work, contact us and we may be able to help.

We still have more machines and anybody who wants to try working with Linux should contact the lab to arrange a time when they can collect a one and have some familiarisation training. We are donating a public access machine to the Cube Cinema, this will help promote the Bristol Wireless project.