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I have 6 486Dx2 boxes that are going to be sent to 3 high schools in Ethiopia from the US. 16megs of 72pin ram, 200Mbytes hard drives, no cd-roms. I do have a budget fo up to $150 per machine for upgrades. Seeking input from
----- Original Message -----
From: Jim Bruer
group on what an ideal configuration, both hardware and software, might be for this use. The schools have nothing at present.
As far as software, you are asking on a Linux mailing list! What do you think we would recommened for choice of OS on these machines? : ) Go with SuSE, if remote admin on this machines has to be done, it can be. If they are in a remote area and have Internet access, you (or the admin) will be able to telnet/ssh2/openssh into the machines and fix %99 problems from anywhere in the world. On a 486/16 megs you are going to have some trouble running some of the more comman desktops. If you check out icewm and dfm they make a great easy to use desktop but don't eat the resources other desktops are known for (cough cough). Together DFM and icewm run extremely fast without allot of a memory foot print, and they are just as easy (IMHO) to use. Will they have internet access? If you network the machines together you could do some proxy/firewall/ip forwarding tricks so that all machines could share 1 Internet connection (which would cut cost to the ISP). You might want to check out BNC (T-Base-2) Ethernet for this small network. BNC ethernet is really cheap. You can pick up the cards for about $5 to free at swap meets, finding them down in freinds basements, etc. The cable is a fair price. That bad thing though, is if 1 machine goes off line, they all go down. They are connected in a circle or ring fashion. Allot of admin time seems to be in working with this BNC cabling. I am not saying networking is the answer, but another advantage of networking this computer together, would they can share each other disk space, etc. Since it looks like you have only 200 megs per machine, this could be a good thing. Again though, in a networked unix envoirment you the admin time will be higher than normal. For hardware parts, check out http://www.pricewatch.com Also swap meets, school sales are a great way to get extra parts to upgrade cheaper than normal. The local high school here where sell about 200 386 machines for 3 bucks a peice. I seen one for $3 and it had 8 megs of ram, 150 meg hard drive, bnc ethernet card, sound card, it was dirty, but $3 for the ethernet card alone is a fair price. 386 also make nice terminals for sending email (elm, pine, mutt) writing papers (pico, joe, vi, emac) or even play on the local mud/BBS : ) Good Luck, Jack
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