[sudo-discuss] Hardware for the masses

[Ed Biow]

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
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