[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes, 4/21/04

FGM Lab Notes, 4/21/04
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Present: Frank and Judy Bradley, Phyllis Chapman, Sherral Stamatovich, Star Mann, Terry Click, Mike Cook, Yunchun Yu, Tom Brown

:: Demanufacture

Monday night Adam Rudin and I humped a dozen boxes or so to the storage room from my garage. The boxes were 386, 486, IBM MCA and low end Pentium. The volunteers disassembled nearly all of them.

We're up to our elbows in deman'd chassis and parts upstairs. Power supplies were stored in one of the trash containers we use to support our standing workbench rather than further cluttering upstairs.

:: Modem and Hard Drive Identification

Terry and I found as many modems as we could in the storage room and gave them to Mike and Star. Mike and Star were able to identify about half the modems before time ran out. They classified the modems according to speed, whether hardware controlled or controller-less, internal or external.

Yunchun looked up specs on hard drives coming out of the deman'd boxes. Adam Rudin will ship a half dozen acceptable drives to a school computer lab in Bolivia in June. Adam is investigating the minimum requirement. The lab in Bolivia uses IBM PCs of the same vintage as we are beginning to demanufacture.

:: Modems for Volunteers

At 9:00 PM we quit work, and Mike gave a lecture to volunteers re dialup modems and communications with PCs. He talked about choosing an ISP and the information the ISP will give to users to setup their dialup communications. Mike informed the class regarding different types of modems and passed around example modems (ISA, PCI, internal, external) and a motherboard with both ISA and PCI expansion slots. Mike used a FreeBox with Vector Linux to illustrate the ports and software side of modem setup.

Mike and I pitched Michiana Freenet as the best overall low cost ISP. We asked volunteers to bring their FreeBoxes to lab next Tuesday when they will pick a modem from among the hardware modems Mike and Star identified. Tech volunteers will help them install the modems. If the volunteers have contacted an ISP and have connection info, we should be able to test the connections during lab.

We may want to setup a box to dialup my Michiana Freenet account to test the modems before installing them. Or we can just use the volunteers' FreeBoxes as the test.

:: Printers

Mike and I briefly discussed choosing a printer for FreeBoxes. We asked folks to bring us the brand and model number of the printers they are interested in so we can check compatibility. It might be a good idea to prepare a list of common inkjet and laser printers which are best suited to GNU/Linux to give to FreeBox recipients.

:: CDROM Installations

We didn't have time to install CDROMs in FreeBoxes for the next class. So we'll do the installs next Tuesday or possibly this Thursday.

:: Thursday Lab

Goose and I are holding Thursday labs 1-2x per month. The first lab is this Thursday, April 22, at 7:00 PM.

:: Tech Day Trip to Chicago

There is still room in the van for the trip to visit John Billings on Tech Day in Chicago this coming Saturday, April 24. Contact me if you want to go.

Tom




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