People really care about a Linux lab!

Last weekend, along with about 15 other people, I volunteered to help install a thin-client computer lab in an elementary school near Wainae. The clients were donated laptops that were headed for e-waste collection, and the server was also donated. All of this was possible through the great expertise and vision of a few core people (Dr. Paul McKimmy, Scott Belford, and Chris Stark). I was just along to help and support the cause: helping out a school by providing quality, useful, educational hardware and software and promoting open-source software. You can read the press release here.

I learned quite a lot in the process. First, I was introduced to CentOS, which seems somewhat similar to Ubuntu. The reason for choosing CentOS is its long-term support for a given release. I also learned how to make a network cable, which was more fun that I thought! And that’s good, because I had to make quite a few. Once we got all of the clients connected and began starting them up, I learned about booting to a network and how sometimes that doesn’t work. But you can get around this problem by booting to a Clonezilla CD instead. Maybe most importantly, I got to see many of the steps involved in setting up a thin-client lab. I have a good idea now of what is needed to put one together if I had the right people to help me. Who knows when you might need one, right? All of this was extremely interesting to me because I have very little experience dealing with hardware. I am inspired to bulid my own computer–after we move back to the mainland.

Perhaps most amazing to me about all of this was my brother’s response. I sent him the press release just to say hey, this is what I’ve been up to (and because I know he is a stauch proponent of open source). And with my permission, he sent it on to Groklaw, a site that publishes information about the legal battles of a company that claims that Linux stole the Unix kernel from them. Groklaw is sympathetic to the Linux side of things. The press release went up almost immediately (due to my brother’s rapport with the site owner?). Very cool. I was invited to write an article for the site, but I couldn’t quite see how my human-interest story would fit in with the legal information I was seeing. So I’m writing it up here, in a way.