[TriLUG] Penguins in the desert

[Barry Gaskins]

 I think Douglas said that he will be limited to using all of the old used
hardware that will be available over there. I would not be suprised if that
turns out to be 100 MHz pentiums with 128MB or less (or even 386 or 486
machines). They may not even have USB connectors and even if they do then
the BIOS will probably not be able to boot from it.
My best advice would be to see if they can give you some idea of what some
of the system specs would be before you leave and for you to burn some CD's
of some Distros that will work with those systems. If they are really low
end systems then forget about some of the latest flashy distros with all the
bells and whistles. Look at low resource distros like DSL (Damn Small
Linux). If you cannot determine what the specs are on the machines before
you leave then burn a dozen different CDs of a whole range of distro's that
have different system requirements. Otherwise you will get there with the
distro that you prefer only to find out that the old machines they have will
not even boot up the install CD.
Find out as much as you can from the people over there about what you have
to work with and burn as many CDs as you can before you leave because once
you get there you will probably not have a high speed connection to download
iso images and a nice CD burner and a bunch of blank CDs.
- Barry Gaskins

On 10/11/05, Lee Fickenscher <elfick at mac.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 11, 2005, at 9:16 PM, Aaron Joyner wrote:
>
> > There have been lots of good suggestions in this thread, but don't
> > neglect to consider sand, dust, and dirt, and their devastating
> > effects on computer hardware. Particularly in a true desert
> > scenario, where you have people walking in and out from the sandy
> > ground (if not sand storms actually blowing sand into where the
> > computers are housed), this is going to result in a much higher
> > maintenance schedule. You'll want to train a couple, or at best
> > maybe a half dozen people, on how to properly disassemble and clean
> > a computer. If they just know to blow the sand out from the inside
> > of the case and how to lubricate and replace cooling fans, you'll
> > be a *lot* better off in the long run.
>
> How about a semi-sealed diskless system using a non-conductive liquid
> coolant?
> Something like:
>
> http://techreport.com/etc/2001q4/comdex/koolance2.jpg
>
> Have it boot from flash and use a USB flash drive for removable
> storage. :)
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