Wow, the coffee shop I frequent switches to Linux
 

I hang out at this coffee shop that has free wireless (unlike Starbuck$) and they also have a PC setup for browsing. It was running Windows 98 forever and I went in tonight on my lunch break to get a cup and I noticed they had switched to Fedora. A rather cool feeling came over me.


Anyway Im talking to a guy at a community center who wants to setup a few desktops for kids (mostly in lower income housing) and he said they just need Internet/spreadsheet and word capabilities so Im convincing insteading shelling out all the money to Dell for 3 PC's to buy 6 refurbished Celerons with no OS and me and a friend could put Ubuntu or Suse or something on there and save him about $300 or more.

when theres enough linux runned coffee ... go !! linux go !!

possibly leave one machine for windows(win98 ??) with some commonly used windows app so that those kids would still feel comfortable and dont "lag behind" too much when facing the predominant(prevalent??) reality ...

imho , so i could be wrong ... :)

kewl that an other public store is openly running linux.

as for the #300 price tag, heck you can put together old referbed PIIs or PIIIs for less then $200 even less then $100 if you can go real low end. just go lite on the GUI desktop so the system does not take 15min to move the mouse across the screen

actually to think about it ... i got linux on a 400 celeron with about 256 ram , they run fast enough(no need chasing after my mouse) whether i use icewm or xfce but not gnome or kde , icewm could be a little bit "primitive" so probably go for xfce(nicer and "modern") if thats possible ...

whatever it is ... goodluck to your project


:D

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That is such a good bit of news! Maybe libraries here will do that! :)

Actually
 

This shocked the heck out of me, but I'm running Linux on a 300 something p2/p3 machiene with 130 megs of RAM, and Gnome handles as fast as with my p4 with more than 700 megs of ram, and it boots about at the same speed and they are both running Fedora Core 4. This had led me to believe that Gnome actually works pretty well with lower end systems. Obviously, things like Firefox and OpenOffice run pretty slow, but the OS and Gnome work fine. Like, no lag at all on menus and small apps.

Yeah, this is a machiene I'm running at school for practice with hardware and networking. The thing is also running a webserver.

Thats good to hear. I work for a company that owns and manages health clubs in Chicago. We have very high end facilities and offer complimentary internet access. Unfortunately the machines I was given to install are really old but serve their purpose. I had windows 98 on them but internet explorer took forever to open, so I installed Suse 9.1 and keep firefox up to date. They have been problem free for the past year and I have had a lot of positive feedback on them.

Hey Jaz!

That is a great way to promote Linux. I took my laptop to Church and showed everybody how user friendly Linux was and had some good feedback on it. One of the key thing in promoting linux as an alternative to running a desktop is public relations.

Let us know if your friend at the community center takes you up on your offer.

Brian

I've a similar feeling when I saw an Ubuntu disc on top of one of the computers in my University :D

I was pretty surprised when i started at uni that on startup you get a choice between WinNT and Debian. All through school it was Windows.

Under either OS, default web browser is Mozilla, default office app is Open Office.