Submitted by rich_c on January 7, 2009 - 10:18pm
So, I've got my first project underway to refurbish a donated system to pass on to an educational establishment. Hopefully, it'll be used by pre-school aged children, so I will be installing Gcompris on it. The install of Mepis 8 RC1 was pretty painless on the 30gb disk it came with. The 800mhz Duron with 300 and something mb memory machine seems to run pretty smoothly and quickly enough. I'm just waiting for a network card I ordered to turn up so I can apply updates and install the extra bits I want to include.
The only puzzle I've got with this one is an internal Iomega 250 drive that is recognised until I try to put a disk in it. I then get all sorts of error messages. I think I'm going to try formatting the disks as ext2 and see if that makes it useable. Otherwise I'll rip it out due to it causing more trouble than it's worth.
More soon...
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Comments
A name for the project and a problem...
by rich_c - Jan 8 2009 - 5:01pm
Well, I came up with a name for my scheme should it get going in any way. PROJECTn. Purely because I just used project1 as the host name for this first machine.
I'm not sure how easily acquirable complete systems are going to in the future though. The BBC just published this article http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7816446.stm which may well make people less willing to donate complete working systems that just need a bit of cosmetic cleaning up and a fresh install. When I get this 'pilot' out of the door and start looking around for another donor, I will have to provide some pretty positive sounding assurances that old data will be removed to a reasonable standard. I can't imagine using Gparted on a disk to partition it up & format it as ext3 and swap as required would leave too much that's recoverable by someone who's less than VERY determined!