Your mission should you choose to accept it is to take something most would consider trash and turn it into treasure. Do you have a local computer recycling program in your area? Would you like to see one that offers FOSS?
If you have answered yes to either then you have the ability to make this ‘mission possible’. There are many computer recycling programs but sadly most use proprietary software because they’re provided with cheap licenses and unwanted machines. These programs are staffed by wonderful volunteers whose hearts are in the right place.
The problem is the software provided is out of date because the machines are too old to run the latest proprietary software, and of course these machines aren’t going to people who can afford to purchase software in the first place right? I don’t think that offers much of a choice for the technically challenged clients that wind up with these boxes. Do you?
The solution is simple enough, provide them with an OS that frees them from paying for software. This is where you come in if you have the time and inclination you can make a difference in your community. All I’m asking for is for you to make an effort to help spread the love you have for FOSS to people who are in need. It will make you feel good and at the same time help grow the FOSS movement.
Case in point, I took an old machine out dusted it off and installed Debian on it with LXDE and compiz, yes compiz. A 450mhz pentium III with 384 mb of ram and an nvidia mx400 (32mb) runs compiz w/ LXDE as the desktop.
While compiz itself isn’t the point, the fact is that better machines than this are being tossed aside all the time, and they need not be. So I hope this has inspired you to take some action and help out in your community.
Linux is maturing pretty rapidly these days which is good for everyone and good press is always welcome it helps turn new users on to freedom.So I was pleased to see this post.Keep in mind that these are both beta releases and we still have time to help make them even better.If you’re interested in giving feedback on them then get started! You can download fedora here and ubuntu releases are available here you can also get a disc from for $1 from On-disk.com if you don’t want to burn your own.
I bought one of these and it’s pretty sweet but it was a bit of a pain to get the wifi to work properly so I thought I’d jot down how I got it to work.I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) 64 bit version because what’s the point of having a 64 bit processor if you don’t utilize it to the fullest? Okay, so down to the specifics I used a bunch of howto’s that I’ll list as we go along.First things first my laptop came with a Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02).If this is what you have then this will probably work for you (ymmv).The restricted driver (bcm43xx) available through the Ubuntu repository did not work with my card but you can try it and see if you get better results.Not working? Keep reading…
The first thing you need to do is start from a clean slate that means removing any drivers or software you’ve used to attempt getting the card to work this includes removing ndiswrapper.Follow the instructions available at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092 to get started.The dell driver does work (I tried it initially with a 32 bit install) but I decided to use the HP driver available at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36501-37000/sp36684.exe (this driver package is for 32 bit Windows XP the 64 bit driver for Vista did not work at all for me).Substitute it if you like or not, both should work.To be safe I rebooted after adding ndiswrapper to be started on boot (sudo echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules) .This configuration got me insecure wifi working which is the first step in getting things sorted.
The next step for me was to get wifi working after suspend/hibernate which is actually pretty simple.You’ll need to make network-manager shut down before suspend and restart on resume.I found info on how to do that here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/NetworkManagerunder the topic “Suspend support”.It makes sense, but for some reason it’s not implemented by default, which is a shame.Hopefully now you have working wifi with suspend/hibernate resume working.
The next step is to test WPA/WEP encryption to see if it works.Since network-manager is a pretty sophisticated set of scripts with a gui interface try to enable WEP or WPA encryption through that first.Does it work for you? If so you’re done and enjoy your new laptop.Not working yet? Okay then here’s what to do. I found that this hack works for me https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4311_rev_01_(ndiswrapper) topic Adding WPA Support (optional).Well that’s it enjoy ;-)
Okay it’s a Friday night and I’m recovering from a cold and bored as well.Here goes another post Synergy! What is it? A way to share a single keyboard and mouse between computers.It works pretty well although it has it’s flaws it sure beats fumbling around for another kb and mouse or using a vnc style app.Check it out at http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/ it’s multi platform so you can use it on linux and mac as well as windows if you must.My setup is pretty simple I use synergy to connect my Gentoo box to my FC5 box.It’s highly configurable with useful options like having the mouse cursor wait until it appears on the other monitor so you don’t accidentally bounce to the other box when you move the mouse fast.Synchronized screensavers on all connected machines an easy way to be more productive if you ask me.
I’m a bit of a music lover and I prefer lossless formats over anything else.I needed to get MAC files to play nice with xmms.A quick search led me to http://sourceforge.net/projects/mac-port/
Once I compiled both packages a quick restart of xmms was all I needed to get sound.
