[frgeek-michiana] Lab Notes 2007-01-16
- From: Tom Brown <tbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: FreeGeek Michiana <frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 18 Jan 2007 13:07:38 -0500
:: Salvation Army Coding Project
Goose and Tom met with Liz and Capt. Jody at the church Tuesday
afternoon. Liz and Jody chose the Adopt-A-Family program as the
project. Jody will contact the regional church headquarters and find
out where the likely host will be and what policies apply to hosting
an online app. Hosting could be at the national, regional or local
level. The project may or may not be an online application depending
on national and regional church policies. In the worst case, the
application will only run on the LAN and will have no public interface.
The application requirements looks straight forward. Goose and Tom
will do as much of the development as possible at Tuesday labs. The
Captains were much relieved that FGM is donating the development to the church.
:: Tech Certification Training Project
Albert has researched the training materials which appears to be a
set of CDs, not DVDs. A Windows box is required to run the training
media. The publishers do not guarantee the materials will run
properly on Gnu/Linux.
Tom will try to find an XP or W2K laptop with video out to hook up to
the TV set in the fellowship hall at the church. If the video looks
ok on the TV set, we might not need to bring the 36" monitor to the
lab. The church's TV set sits on top of a mobile AV cart. If we need
the monster monitor, it will probably fit on the cart.
:: Monitor Recycling
Forest reported on the cost of recycling approximately 32 monitors at
our vendor in Chicagoland. The cost was $9 per monitor ($288.00),
plus shipping ($224). The total estimated cost was $512.00 or $16 per
monitor. True cost is higher. Future costs are likely to go up rather
than down.
As it is, we are losing money on recycling monitors because we are
not charging enough to cover our known costs. If we had to pay for
storage, our true costs would be much higher. Also, we too often
accept monitors without charging the $15 recycling fee.
Our options are to deman monitors and recoup some costs by recycling
the copper yokes and circuit boards or to stop accepting monitors at all.
Our vendor says they will charge less than $9 for bare CRTs. How much
less is a mystery. Getting specific information from the company is
like pulling teeth. Shipping bare CRTs may require special packing
which could increase costs and time and nullify the deman option.
Forest proposed that we inventory our monitors so we know what our
current total CRT liability is. Then we can decide how to handle
monitors. Albert, Mike and Tom agreed. Tom will also contact Virtual
Scavengers and ask how they deal with monitors.
Mike can build a safe electrical discharge tool for demanning
monitors. Dale has done the basic research on disassembling monitors
and and recycling the components.
:: Lab Virtualization
The most likely near term scenario for virtualizing the lab is to try
for 8 virtual machines based on our current Debian/LTSP production
install. We can clone our production hard drive to a spare hard drive
and use the spare to experiment on. If we have a problem, there is
nothing lost. Several of the virtualization platforms Mike, Goose and
Rick are playing with will support 8 instances of virtual machines on
dual core, dual processor systems such as our lab server.
:: Ubuntu Modem Support
Mike unhappily reports that the most current version of Ubuntu has
less modem support than previous versions. He thinks Ubuntu may be
giving up on modems altogether. For modem support, Ubuntu now refers
users to the LinModem project website.
The version of Ubuntu Mike installed - I wish I could remember which
version - had difficulty finding and using an external hardware
modem. Mike needed to access the modem with wvdial.
:: FreeBox Distro Contest
Tom volunteered to bring a half dozen similarly configured PCs to the
lab from the warehouse and set them side by side on the unused table
so we can compare distros. Rick dropped off a KVM switch and cables.
###
** This list is PUBLICLY archived. **
PLEASE don't post personal or sensitive information unless you wish for it to
be in the public domain.
To post to the list send email to frgeek-michiana@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The archive is available at //www.freelists.org/archives/frgeek-michiana/
You may unsubscribe or change your list settings by going to the list website
at //www.freelists.org/webpage/frgeek-michiana
Other related posts:
