[sudo-discuss] Hardware for the masses

My crony Gerald & I picked up about 15 'puters from Youth Radio <https://youthradio.org/> today, and brought them to the sudoroom. We also grabbed about 7 monitors and a bag full of cables. These boxen look pretty sweet, dual core, Windows 8, 4 GB of RAM. I was planning on installing some version of Trusty Tahr (*buntu 14.04) or maybe Debian testing and then using a live disc (redobackup <http://redobackup.org/>) to blow the image on the rest of the machines after testing the memory and hard drives. Brian, the IT bloke at YR is replacing the machines with NUC <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Unit_of_Computing>s. It looks like there are another 30 or so of these Dells available to us when they get readied. If we can spare the table space maybe we can set up a few machines for visitor browsing in a quiet corner somewhere. And we should have some nice boxes for the Oakland kids' computer center. The four boxes I have ready to go are mostly pretty funky, missing panels, or very loud, etc. I'm sure we can find them a home, though. I also have a few more expendable desktop Linux machines at home. Finding rodents, power cords, monitors & keyboards may prove a bit of a challenge, though I have a few extra keyboards and power cables. I'm planning on going camping in August, but in September I'd like to start hosting a weekly Linux install fest/trouble shooting session on Friday afternoons at 4 PM. Folks can bring their Linux problems in for troubleshooting, and I can bring pizza back from a pickup I make at 8PM from a local collective. Maybe if nothing else is going on we can cap the evening with a tech/polit-related flick to go with the pizza, perhaps even a round of frosty malted beverages. As I mentioned before, maybe we could use some always-on machine to act as a proxy for deb files, so we could update machines at 11MB a second instead of pounding our limited internet bandwidth. I'm familiar with approx and apt-cacher, though there are others. I'll bring up the idea during one of our weekly Wednesday meetings soon. Einstein & campaign staff