Hi Guys,
IBM donated 15 notebooks to LSF (via ICTA) for Sahana development
and for data input from NGOs. Because IBM has to pay for the XP
licenses they tried to get MSFT to donate it but were not successful.
ICTA also tried, but were only offered 2 licenses, because the
machines are going to be used for open source development and
because the software that's going to be running on them is all
open source. (I'm sure there are other reasons they will come up
with when pressed later, but that was indeed a point raise by the
local MSFT country manager.) Instead, they want ICTA to buy the XP
licenses at $135/license. Yes, MSFT wants $135*13 to make these
machines useable at this time for stuff related to Tsunami relief.
ICTA is willing to buy them in order to put the machines to work, but
I have asked them not to.
So, while originally I didn't feel that giving a Linux desktop to
someone who can barely use a computer will work, we appear to have no
choice. Plus its a tremendous opportunity to show how life can go
on without MSFT.
I need your help. We need to install a Linux distro on these notebooks,
take them to the receiving orgs, help them and hand-hold them until
they are comfortable. We'd need to have Samba and CUPS and we need to
make sure they can print from these on whatever stuff they have. The
application runs in a browser - that should be Firefox, of course.
What distro? You guys are the experts but I suggest something with
*really* good hardware detection because notebooks tend to have flaky/
weird hardware. Also, the power management *has to* work.
What desktop? My preference and intuition is that Gnome is more "user
friendly" than KDE but you guys are the experts.
How about something like Lindows??
Can a couple of people volunteer to help with this immediately? If
necessary I can get the machines to you but we have 5 sitting in the
UCSC LSF lab right now and we can start with those. Also IBM has a
disk remastering thing .. so if we get one fixed up just perfect I
can probably ask them for help with remastering the other disks.
If you can help please call me on my cell phone 077 787 6880.
Bye,
Sanjiva.
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