mohoohoo
Group: Members
Posts: 3
Joined: Sep. 2005 |
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Posted: Sep. 14 2005,07:57 |
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Hello,
Last week I was lucky enough to get my hand on about 20 DELL Optiplex G100s and G110s. The specs of these machines vary though the lowest specked machine has is a PIII 500 Mhz machines with 128MB and 5GB hard drives.
What I am trying to do is build the machines with some sort of OS and application suite that would suit a novice computer user that needs to write documents, communicate by email, and research on the internet in addition to being easy to look after and keep healthy and stable. The reason I want to build the machines like is that I am trying to send them to Bangladesh to be used in community organizations, health centers, and small offices supporting advocacy work etc.
I've tried Linspire and Ubuntu - Ubuntu is yet to install at all and though I have Linspire installed on one machine it didn't take to my other test machine and the machine it is running is running pretty slow with the all the graphics etc.
I wrote to Ladislav at Distro Watch and he had some great advice and ideas. I checked out DAMM Small Linux and Puppy Linux, on Ladislav's recommendation, and also checked out Chubby Linux. I thought Chubby Linux but have been advised that DSL might be easier to update in the long run.
What do you think of DSL? Good I guess as you made it but I my question is really is it secure, stable, sensible? I looked at the applications in the screen shots I came across and the GUI looked quite simple and so I was thinking perhaps the applications on the distribution were old versions. Is this right? For some things it might not be a problem if they are old versions but if, for instance, the browser was old and didn't handle Flash and a user in Dhaka tried to access a web page that used Flash it wouldn't work and so they would be stuck with some cryptic error message and wouldn't know what to do; as you would appreciate this is just one possible scenario of many.
Still what came to mind as I thought about Chubby and DSL is how fast and easily they would run on even the lowest specked machine I have here. What would you say if I said that I was thinking to put DSL on all the computers? Do you think it wise, silly, limited, hard to use, the wrong choice, a good choice for what I am trying to do, for who will use the machines, for the totally unsupported environment the machines will be used in? I wonder? The plan, at this point, is to build the machines with some sort of OS and application suite that would suit a novice computer user that needs to write documents and share documents with the wider world (which generally use MS Office), communicate by email, and research on the internet. The build would be easy to look after and keep healthy and operate stably as the end users could be street children, health workers, advocacy workers, school children, etc. There is a big possibility (given I've got about 20 machines) that the machines would be networked in groups of 5 or so and share an internet connection and a printer? Can DSL handle being networked like this? How well, or not, do you think that DSL suits this project and meets the needs of this sort of end user community. One of my concerns is what happens if they want to print, or put in a CD, or, as I used my creative writing skills above to describe, if they go to a Flash website and the browser doesn't handle it - they wont know what to do and will be stuck without support.
I think your distribution is very clever and would really appreciate your frank thoughts and ideas on how it may or may not suit what I am trying to do here. Any further suggestions how best I can progress and sustain this project are also welcome.
Cheers,
Adrian
b/w Also, can DSL run from a little USB flash memory stick (like my iShuffle)???
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