[Tfug] Waste-Not Warehouse - was(Computer Recycling)

[Bill M.]

Ammon,

Message: 11
Date: Wed, 5 Nov 2003 07:43:41 -0700 (MST)
From: "Ammon Lauritzen" <ammon at simud.org>
Subject: Re: [Tfug] Waste-Not Warehouse - was(Computer Recycling)
To: "Tucson Free Unix Group" <tfug at tfug.org>
Message-ID: <33996.68.0.140.28.1068043421.squirrel at mail.simud.org>
Content-Type: text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1

Mike Martinet said:
>> He told me that Microsoft donates licenses for all the computers he
>> manages to cobble together, so there's no need for Linux on stripped
>> machines.  :(

> No need? It's only a case of actually getting life out of the
>machines.
>
> Running *nix, a PII is still perfectly usable. Running windows...
>well, slow is an understatement.

I work at a high school in Amphitheater district. Our new technology
director has made it clear that he wants to move in a direction that is
completely the opposite of our current environment. The end result would
be a complete Windows environment (servers migrate from Netware 6 &
Linux to Win Server 2003), and since the PII/233 HP desktops in the
majority of the classrooms and administrative locations won't support a
newer MS OS(4 Gb. HD, speed, cost of new license beyond Win95), his idea
is to simply plop down a new HP box with Win XP Pro, Office 2003. We're
talking 70-75% of 4,500 PCs in one fell swoop! Major $$$

I would love to see all the HP PII/233 systems changed over to something
like Mandrake with OpenOffice.org 1.1, Mozilla, you name it. I think
there would be great gnashing of teeth from the teachers' classrooms --
they are very stubborn and resistant to change. Plus, major change to
the day-to-day workings of administration: student information systems
software is decidedly MS-centric. It's a hard sell. But, if Apache
Junction School District can go Open Source to the desktop, I'd say go
for it!

> I'd hate to see what XP does to it...
We couldn't run Office XP on our existing Win95 HP PII/233 boxes--Office
XP requires Win 98 and the disk space requirements wouldn't leave much
left over. Running XP OS is out of the question--these boxes crawl now
with Win95.

> -- 
> Ammon Lauritzen
> ammon at simud.org

-*-Bill