Hello Tosh, gotta computer?

In the last few weeks, the lab has paid host to some newer versions of Toshiba’s perennial Satellite line of notebooks. Our mobile LTSP suite runs on donated Toshiba satellites that are over 12 years old! 😉

The new batch is a bit newer – they’re mere youngsters of 3 or 4 years vintage. They’ve come from Bristol City Council via Connecting Bristol and have been sent to us for Linux installation for use on a forthcoming open source web development workshop being organised by the Scarman Trust.

Thanks to the hard work of Bristol Wireless volunteer Andy Sabel, this work has now been done and they’re due to be collected next week.

Of the original 6 machines supplied, 2 unfortunately were broken and cannot be used immediately: one had a dead screen, whilst another had a non-working DVD drive. However, the other 4 have had various Linux distributions installed, with 2 ‘flavours’ common to all – Mepis and Mandriva2008, the latter being the surplus from the batch of goodies Mandriva kindly supplied for our Social Source South West conference (news passim).

Andy says, “These were chosen for their general usability, software selection, familiar appearance and compatibility with the hardware. Each machine goodies will have an extra OS* installed purely to demonstrate the different range of available ‘distros’ available and one laptop will still have Windows installed to show it is possible to run both on a single machine, although we cannot support Windows in any way.”

The machines will be going back to Connecting Bristol following the Scarman Trust training, but will be available for Bristol Wireless to borrow for use on community projects.

* = the additional Linux systems are OpenSuSE, Ubuntu, Fedora Core and DreamLinux