I became a member of Freecycle a few months ago to get some stuff for my new duplex. I've since seen a few used monitors offered there and a few days ago, an old Compaq desktop with DamnSmallLinux pre-installed.
I thought you guys might find that an interesting way to introduce new people to Linux, as well as a way to donate old hardware to someone in need. I would still offer stuff up to the KCLUG group first, since I personally know many of you, but for items that this group is not interested in, I'd put out on Freecycle maillist.
Oren was bending my ear at the last meeting about LiveCDs and installs for old PCs, for donations and charity work. My recommendation stands with DamnSmallLinux and Puppy Linux. I believe both can save/restore sessions to USB pen drives or to remaining tracks on CD-R and RW disks that had ISO written as multi-session, if the PC has a CDRW drive. They then can use some unionfs, file overlays and possibly voodoo to restore settings, /home directories, add-on programs that have been downloaded, etc. Or either distro would easily and quickly install to even a small HDD, like a 1 GB or less. 64 MB is probably a realistic minimum RAM for these with a Pentium CPU (More RAM is always better, especially if ran as a LiveCD, up to 1GB).
One other good use is a Linux Firewall using IPCop. There are many cheap and easy integrated firewall, switch, router, wireless APs out there, but for someone looking to learn some network security, IPCop is a viable option for more of this old hardware. Again, Pentium CPU and 32MB on up. Way more if you want to have a bunch of VPN connections, but I run on 64MB and a 2GB HDD.
Just passing on info to get a little more useful life out of some of this hardware that is gathering dust in our basements.
The problem with FreeCycle is the number of people getting stuff just to sell it on eBay... and a horrible UI for the task. But it does seem a good place to distribute some of my excess Kubuntu disks ;)
It is in the Freecycle rules that re-selling items recieved is a no-no. That doesn't stop some people, but it does give an excuse to blacklist the abusers when found. I've recently given away several systems on Freecycle, including that COMPAQ with DSL on it. I've gotten about a dozen responses for each system, and most have some sort of hardluck or sob story attached. It makes it hard to tell who is telling the truth about needing a system, or just hoping that they'll get picked so they can re-whatever with it. One of my main tactics for giving away a system is if someone can make it somewhat obvious that they know what they are doing with it. I'm not going to make life hard for somebody and give them a P-133 with 32MB RAM and let them go off and think WINXp will be dandy on it. ;)
I had offered a few things here, but through my own scatter mind I let the deals drop. I've been much better at keeping up with doing free give aways on Freecycle. I've got some better equipment that I need to part with, and it's too good to let go for free so I'll be posting some of it on here in a while. If anyone I had made a dela with previously is still interested, let me know I'll try to keep things going this time around.
Jon.
On 8/22/06, Luke-Jr luke@dashjr.org wrote:
The problem with FreeCycle is the number of people getting stuff just to sell it on eBay... and a horrible UI for the task. But it does seem a good place to distribute some of my excess Kubuntu disks ;) _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug