Recycling old pcs with Puppy to nonprofits

[Foucault]

I'm sure that someone out there is doing this.

I'm very active in my local community, and have dealings with many local nonprofits. I also know how Mr Gates' baby has been forcing people to buy new PCs every couple of years. I'm a member of my local Freecycle.org group and see older PCs come up every so often. I also know that local businesses discard older PCs.

Even though I haven't got Puppy working to my satisfaction on my own (wireless) laptop, I can see the potential for grabbing old PCs, putting Puppy on them, installing free wordprocessing, spreadsheet softare, etc. and giving them to local organizations and the needy.

I'm wanting to make the digital divide a little narrower. Can someone point me in the right direction? I'd like to meet others doing the same thing. I'd also like some advice on doing this.

[muggins]

Foucault,

i did some voluntary work for a small computerbank group, here in the illawarra, australia, which was started by a local businessman. companies would donate obsolete equipment to the group & we were upgrading ram & installing ubuntu, then giving away for free. i recently saw a photo of the guy running the place, in the local newspaper, where a botswanan student was accepting a bunch of refurbished computers to take back to africa.

one major problem was the workshop quickly becomes swamped with junk as people use us to dump stuff & save themselves a trip to the rubbish tip.

so you have to ascertain what the absolute minimum specs are that you'll accept. while it would be good to be able to recycle everything, you've only got so many hours in the day to fix/check/install & get a working machine, and if you take everything, you'll be swamped with junk & space will rapidly disappear.

another issue is who gets your computer. this mightn't be a problem where you are, but for the computerbank here a lot of the "customers" were dodgy characters to put it nicely, after a computer they could try & sell in the pub etc.

but i defintely think your idea is good & worthwhile as i think puppy is ideal for such a purpose. i can't work out what the big deal is with ubuntu as i find puppy easier to use, and despite it's size, has more functionality.

anyway here's a link to one such group in melbourne, victoria:

http://vic.computerbank.org.au/

[never_stop_learning]

A group of us started a branch Lions Club in Reno, NV to accomplish just this.

We just received our first grant to purchase metro-grade WiFi access points and are in the process of lighting up areas of town that house families who may not be able to afford Internet access.

So far interested parties include Reno Cigar Lions (a branch of Reno Host Lions), ComputerCorps, the local CompUSA and several other non-profits, churches, etc. CompUSA has offered to act as a drop-off point for the donated computers, ComputerCorps has offered to refurbish them (and possibly do some of the Puppy installs), the Reno Cigar Lions load Puppy and work with the non-profits, churches, etc. to distribute the computers to the kids who need them. Our Lions Club also does the engineering, deployment and administration for the WiFi network.

We are still ramping things up and working out the details. I'm sure that, as we really get this project rolling, we'll ask for your advice and knowledge to help us overcome any issues we encounter with wireless, etc.

[outcydr]

here's a link i dug up from my old bookmarks. i really wish they had something like this close to where i live.

http://freegeek.org/index.php

[raffy]

Great idea for a project! For that, I guess the first step is teaching people about alternative (and more standards-based) file formats for exchanging info, such as RTF for word processing and CSV for spreadsheets, etc, so they won't end up feeling "cheap" if M$ is not on the donated boxes.

ecomoney (a forum member) intends to build a tutorial for refurbishing old PCs at bexa.org (a course building site for Puppians).

Fr Ben Beltran in Manila is getting as much of these recycled PCs as he could - see this article (unfortunately, sandiwaan.org, Beltran's site, does not render pages, will ask them why).

I hope people doing this kind of work can publish a video or web page of what they are doing, to encourage others.

[Foucault]

Thanks for the links and suggestions, all. My priority is to get my own copy of Puppy working on my laptop, but I'm still very keen on this idea. I often have people contact me regarding volunteer opportunities, and it might work well to find a small team of computer enthusiasts who could do the installing, testing, and so on.

I haven't contacted ecomoney yet - that sounds like a good lead.

[ecomoney]

Hi there Faucault

Puppy is exellent for doing what you suggest. Were a member of our local freecycle group as well (in fact weve used puppy and phpbb to set up a forum for them instead of all those emails!) - www.regive.org.uk

I just carry about a 1gig MP3 player and a puppy 1.09CE disk and a 2.02 disk. Every time I come across an older pc (or a dead newer one)I wipe the disk with GPARTED in 2.02, wham the mp3 player in, copy the pup001 to the root directory, reboot with the 1.09CE disk in and presto, working pc. Sometimes I have to run the "xorgwizard" if X doesnt start but essentially thats it. When your used to winblows taking 4 1/2 hours to set up every time it fails or catches a keylogger (i.e. very often) it makes life very....satisfying.

We recently set up a cybercafe for our local drop in centre (story [url=http://www.ecomoney.co.uk/node/83]here[/url) and we just set up 1 and used the ftp server built in to copy the pup001 file to the other four pc's via the network. We used smoothwall (www.smoothwall.org) as a network connection sharing pc (hint hint would be great if someone whould show us how to do this with puppy as it wasted an entire pc! See our other threads).

We set it up using the "xp-new" skin, AMSN, the blue "E" wrapper from the dotpup downloader that looks a teensy bit like the IE icon, and changed the icons for Abiword and Gnumeric. It takes people a long time to figure out they are not using doze. When they do, they wonder what the hell it is as they usually assume there is nothing else. Were happy to set them straight!

If there are any puppy developers out there who would be interested in working on a "rescue pack" version of puppy for the recently bereaved windows owner, we have a wealth of experience. Would win a lot of hearts and minds!

[Foucault]

This is great information, ecomoney! I think you and I need to chat sometime. May I contact you? Feel free to contact me also.

I'm currently working on a little project to revive an old Gateway 2000 laptop I'm hoping to give my limited income parents back in England (I'm an expat Brit, born and bred in Luton, now living in New Jersey, USA. We would love to be able to email them, and send them the odd photo of their two-year-old-and-growing Granddaughter). My challenge right now is finding an Internet Service Provider for them. I want something that will be compatible with Linux, of course. They don't have cable - in fact they still have the old-style telephone wall connectors! We're visiting for Christmas, and so I'd love to have something all set up for when we go over.

[ecomoney]

No Problem...click the link in the sig and go to "contact us".

With regards the connection, anything that will attatch with a standard ethernet cable will do the trick. Ive yet to find a network card that puppy doesnt have the drivers included for. If they already have a phone line they can get carphone warehouse 8mb internet connection for

[ecomoney]

Just a quick note, if you need to get your hands on old p.c.s for running puppy, then you should check out your local freecycle network.

Weve got a lot of old p.c.'s and components from there that are just great for puppying.

[ecomoney]

Heres a few pics from the field that we made during our work..



2 Kids learning computers that were installed with edubuntu(we made their news page as a case study here). These are installed at a breakfast/after school club at Barton Viking Resource Centre (were looking forward to trying the new educational version of puppy!) Total cost thanks to Linux