[NTLUG:Discuss] Placing out feelers

[Ralph Green, Jr.]

On Thu, 2005-06-23 at 17:10 -0500, Andrew Brown wrote:
> Any recc'd on system min's to set up front? Which distro to use? I use fedora 
> and Suse. Fedora is ok but does need some plugin's to get it really good. 
> Suse comes with most the bells and whistles... any recc'd?!?!
> 
  I think just about any Pentium or better with sufficient memory can be
useful.  I think I would pass on 486 systems.  Now, you get to think
about useful.  A P90 with 256 meg is much better than nothing, but I
would not give it to anyone.  It might be better purposed as a firewall,
media server, or just used by a patient person who only want to do
email.  For an average user, I'd say a P2/300, or K6/500 is ok for
surfing and answering email.  Either one would be very marginal for
playing downloaded videos.  I don't mean music videos, although some
would care about that.  If kids are to get these, they will want to play
a variety of educational videos.  You want to get up to about a P3/500
for that to be smooth.  If you can handle using judgement to see who
gets what machine, then take any Pentium to start with.  Otherwise, set
the minimum at about a P3/500 with 256 meg ram and a 4 gig hard drive.

 Plan on using a bunch of hard drives.  They will have failed in many
old systems and some people will destroy the old drive before giving the
systems away.  Consider using SCSI.  It is not that these users need
SCSI, but there are a lot of used 4 to 18 gig scsi drives to be had
cheap.  Find a few basic LSI, BusLogic, or Adaptec PCI SCSI controllers
and you can use them.  The controllers are cheap, too and I think I
would trust giving a 4 gig SCSI drive over a 4 gig IDE drive.


> and don't start a distro flame war over the distros please hahaha!
  Surely, you jest.  That is part of the fun.  I would probably pick
Xandros OCE or Ubuntu, since I expect many of the recipients will be
inexperienced.  SuSE is nice and if Novell helps fund this, then I would
suggest thinking about SuSE.