I just wanted to follow-up on what I've figured out about the donated electronics we got a couple of weeks ago.

I grabbed the following:

- Dell Latitude E6420

The Dell laptop seems to be perfectly functional aside from a dead battery. I installed Debian 11 and Windows 10 on it with no issues. I also ordered a replacement battery for it for around $20, which seems to be working just fine. Here's the one I ordered: https://www.ebay.com/itm/264468438245

#NotSponsored

- iPad 3rd Generation

The iPad 3 tablets need to be factory reset, because the school apparently didn't bother to even log students out of their accounts on the one I got. I had to go through the settings until I found "profiles", which had a student and a teacher profile, and deleted both profiles. That revealed the hidden factory reset button. After resetting the tablet to a fresh state, I learned that the iPad 3 is, unfortunately, too old to do much with as is.

The newest iOS version that supports the hardware is iOS 9.5.something, and there are almost no apps available anymore that will run on it. I did manage to jailbreak it using 3uTools, but that didn't get me anywhere, as there aren't any Linux distributions that can be installed on the iPad. The jailbreak was also kind of a pain, because 3uTools doesn't run on Linux, the jailbreak required an Apple ID, and the iPad is old enough that the jailbreak only worked from Windows 7 (which itself is a bit old and not completely straightforward to get anymore).

One thing I'm interested in is that several people seem to have had success repurposing the screen, albeit without the touch capabilities:

- HP tablet

I haven't done as much research on this device, as it seems more obscure, but I'm afraid it had probably suffered a similar fate to that of the iPad; It's so old at this point, that there's not much that will run on it. However, I have not confirmed this. It's possible that it's still totally usable for something.

Thanks,

--Elaine