Greece: open source computer lab donated to children’s centre

Greeklug, the Greek free software advocacy group, has donated a free and open source software computer lab to a children’s shelter in the village of Filyro, north of Thessaloniki, Joinup reports. Apart from providing installation and hardware, the group is also organising training courses for the children.

“We contacted the orphanage, offering our expertise, our time and efforts”, comments Greeklug vice-president Kostas Mousafiris. Greeklug members donated some of the hardware, including 7 PCs, one server, a laptop, network cables and other peripherals.

Most of the PCs and the server are running Ubuntu. One PC is is running the Debian and Ubuntu-based gNewSense distribution.

Greeklug also implemented Squid as a proxy server and configured Dansguardian to filter unwanted web content, as well as translating some of the software into Greek. The group is making these translations publicly available.

In addition, one of the group members, primary school teacher Yannis Kaskamanidis, has offered to help the children become familiar with the new set-up.

Finally, Greeklug recently started to work on a second, comparable computer lab. It will be built for a primary school in the Thessaloniki suburb of Pylaia