[olug] small pentiums receive a home

[Cale Lewis]

Pass along my email address to the troop or troops that have them if you'd 
like. I've recently offered one of the scout leaders here in Glenwood to help 
provide some more balanced PC OS education than they are likely to get 
otherwise and some of the resources I'm planning on offering them might be of 
interest to them as well.

Here I plan to use Knoppix & kin LiveCDs of course, along with more standard 
Linux, FreeBSD, and BeOS installations, but not just for their desktop OS 
abilities. I also plan to cover what little I've learned about building 
custom packages and images for use on just these sort of inexpensive and 
often discarded types of hardware. It's sure to some interest when they find 
out how easy it is to get started on several types of small projects. It will 
sure beat the hell out of crystal radios, which were about the height of the 
'Home-Built Electronics' projects I was exposed to as a kid!

I'll use the projects I've made out of old IA's and thinclients for demos, 
but they could benefit even more by having something to get some 'hands on' 
time with by adding a few cheap CF card to IDE adapters. Then they can 
experiment with building an image and plugging the CF card in to see how well 
it works for what they had designed it to do. Those little systems don't have 
much they can hurt easily, and a few old cards will let them try network, 
audio, and some video experiments at very low cost to anyone.

I'm hoping for a 'snowball effect' as well. The ones that really develop an 
interest and keep at it might help the others behind them by providing peer 
group level encouragement and letting some of their 'old kit' filter down as 
they move on into more complex systems.

If any of the rest of you have any old components laying around just 
gathering dust & dirty looks from your wife, or software or time to kick in, 
we might have the makings of a great community relations/education project 
for the odd weekend or evening once in a while.

Cale Lewis
>
>  The small Pentiums have been claimed as a group and they're going to 
>be used by Boyscouts. I'm thrilled they're going to be of use for 
>someone ...