kejava
January 13th, 2008, 07:31 PM
Hello everyone,
NTR (ntronline.org (http://ntronline.org)) is having a real problem with their laptop inventory. They have a big room where they keep them and it has become very disorganized. It's so disorganized that they are having a difficult time pushing them out to their thrift store and they can't find parts to fix existing customers' laptops. I told Stan that I think members of the PA LoCo can help. This post is my attempt to gather volunteers.
I tried doing this same exact thing last year but it was just me a few other people. Ultimately, it failed because we lost an inside man at NTR. Now with the PA LoCo matured, I think this is the right moment to try again. In order to go forward with this, I requested that Stan allow us to use Linux in some way. He said that any laptop that is too old or odd (no Win drivers) to accept any flavor of Windows, could have Linux installed on it. And by any flavor of Windows, I'm pretty sure that only means Windows 2000 but I'll have to confirm. If that's the case, it opens us up to fairly large portion of his laptop inventory.
The only issue I can foresee the LoCo having with this is that most of the laptops we'll have access to will only support stripped down Linux distros like DamnSmallLinux and Puppy. I see that as temporary. All laptops that we can salvage will be put into the thrift store an sold at low prices. The customers will be very aware that these have Linux install and there is no support included from NTR. I believe that eventually NTR customers will begin requesting higher end laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. It could take a year or more. But when it happens we'll be ready for it.
OK, how will we do this? I'm looking for at least 4 volunteers from our PA LoCo that can be at NTR once a month. The minimal situation would be to have one of our people at NTR every Saturday to focus on laptop issues. Being a different person each time, we should only need about 4 people.
I know some of you would like to help but traveling into the city is just not an option. That's OK. You can still help! Jedijf and I rarely do our laptop work "onsite". We take the laptops home and, in our spare time, we hack the hell out of them. If any of you like that option, let us know we'll drop off batches to you or we'll help you pick them up.
There should be other areas where we could use support, like tracking any of the laptops take out of NTR. We could use a spreadsheet or web page for managing laptop information. Another area of support ... NTR sometimes receives laptops as lots on palettes. In those cases, they tend to image the drives one-at-a-time. Right now, they're doing this with a batch of 30 laptops. Perhaps one of you could introduce them to a Linux solution using networked imaging. Any Clonezilla masters in our group?
I'm sure I've missed some details or created some gray areas. Please post your questions and comments.
-kevin
PS: I will be making a wiki page where you can sign up and commit to a task.
NTR (ntronline.org (http://ntronline.org)) is having a real problem with their laptop inventory. They have a big room where they keep them and it has become very disorganized. It's so disorganized that they are having a difficult time pushing them out to their thrift store and they can't find parts to fix existing customers' laptops. I told Stan that I think members of the PA LoCo can help. This post is my attempt to gather volunteers.
I tried doing this same exact thing last year but it was just me a few other people. Ultimately, it failed because we lost an inside man at NTR. Now with the PA LoCo matured, I think this is the right moment to try again. In order to go forward with this, I requested that Stan allow us to use Linux in some way. He said that any laptop that is too old or odd (no Win drivers) to accept any flavor of Windows, could have Linux installed on it. And by any flavor of Windows, I'm pretty sure that only means Windows 2000 but I'll have to confirm. If that's the case, it opens us up to fairly large portion of his laptop inventory.
The only issue I can foresee the LoCo having with this is that most of the laptops we'll have access to will only support stripped down Linux distros like DamnSmallLinux and Puppy. I see that as temporary. All laptops that we can salvage will be put into the thrift store an sold at low prices. The customers will be very aware that these have Linux install and there is no support included from NTR. I believe that eventually NTR customers will begin requesting higher end laptops with Ubuntu pre-installed. It could take a year or more. But when it happens we'll be ready for it.
OK, how will we do this? I'm looking for at least 4 volunteers from our PA LoCo that can be at NTR once a month. The minimal situation would be to have one of our people at NTR every Saturday to focus on laptop issues. Being a different person each time, we should only need about 4 people.
I know some of you would like to help but traveling into the city is just not an option. That's OK. You can still help! Jedijf and I rarely do our laptop work "onsite". We take the laptops home and, in our spare time, we hack the hell out of them. If any of you like that option, let us know we'll drop off batches to you or we'll help you pick them up.
There should be other areas where we could use support, like tracking any of the laptops take out of NTR. We could use a spreadsheet or web page for managing laptop information. Another area of support ... NTR sometimes receives laptops as lots on palettes. In those cases, they tend to image the drives one-at-a-time. Right now, they're doing this with a batch of 30 laptops. Perhaps one of you could introduce them to a Linux solution using networked imaging. Any Clonezilla masters in our group?
I'm sure I've missed some details or created some gray areas. Please post your questions and comments.
-kevin
PS: I will be making a wiki page where you can sign up and commit to a task.