Thursday, September 08, 2005

We need your old PCs!


We need your old PCs!
Originally uploaded by gadget.
Over the Memorial day weekend I was trying to get groups together to build a mesh ad-hoc network at some of the big centers where Katrina victims were coming in. This was not feasible with all of the movement and confusion, but the fine folks at www.publicwebstations.com have come up with a Linux distro that boots from CDR and loads FireFox. Here is what you need to do. Go to your closet and grab that old P2 or AMD machine (or greater) with 128MB of RAM. Take out the hard drive and configure the BIOS to boot from CD-ROM. Burn the ISO from the above web site, plug your machine into a wired Ethernet jack and boot it up. You should see Firefox load and take you to a Red Cross welcome page. If that works then head to a shelter in your community and offer to install the systems that you bring. What are you waiting for? I know that you have an old computer in your closet!

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