My crony Gerald & I picked up about 15 'puters from Youth Radio 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) 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 NUCs.  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