I seem to have stirred up quite a bit of debate with this.
Michael Devenish makes a good suggestion that the Race Online volunteers need to get a bit of education with Ubuntu. It is an achievement to get it on the menu as an option but it is clear that the Microsoft spin doctors have had a hand in the wording of the Remploy site. The Windows option gets more coverage and glowing terms like 'safe and familiar'. It gets 50% more coverage in fact!
It would have been nice to have little snippets like Linux's 20 year history and the fact it runs on > 95% of all super computers. The page is very biased to say the least.
It is regrettable that the computers are such low spec, but if you are on benefits even another £50 spent on improving this would seem like a lot.
Another thing we could help with as a community is finding ways of making there low spec computers tolerable. It seems the place they have been squeezed the most is memory.
Surely collectively the 'geek' community must have quite a bit of smaller capacity and old tech memory lying about. But could let the recipients of these systems get to 512 meg or more. Its just a matter of matching up memory type with who needs it. This is something that local Linux user groups need to do. Each group could have a 'charity box' of donated bits that could just be the thing to make some otherwise piece of junk live again.
Using a computer need not be expensive. Just time consuming (but interesting).
If the right memory cannot be found at the right (i.e. very low or free) price then at a pinch adding a second HD just for swap makes even a low memory system far more tolerable, or taking things on the head and running the OS from a £5 USB stick, just using the HD for swap. The biggest cost of swap is the fact that the disk heads have been forced away from what they were up to at the time. Take that out of the equation and a swapping system could be called sedate but not as easily catatonic. All for an old small capacity HD.
We need to give these people confidence that they can 'pimp their ride' like this.
I want people to see this as an opportunity to get a vibrant local Linux SIG going in your own area as a service to the community.
Service can take many forms, helping more people out of the darkness of ignorance is one thing.
These people will be done no favours if they go from no computer knowlege to trying to cope with XP, especially on such a low spec machine! And later perhaps some of those same people introduced to the way the global community of the Internet really is become useful contributors to cool free software projects. There is nothing to be lost by sharing more widely.
With free software 'the feeding of the 5,000' (biblical reference there) is not a miracle, because the duplication of it is what computers do as a fundamental operation, it is just a matter of attitude to want it to happen.
For anyone in Essex I am trying to restart the Chelmer LUG in Chelmsford. We had our first meeting last weekend and had great support from SOSLUG - but are in need of some more local volunteers too.
-- *Deluxe Technology Ltd* /Linux Consultant/ mhous...@deluxe-tech.co.uk <mailto:mhous...@deluxe-tech.co.uk> http://www.deluxe-tech.co.uk Mob: 07970 850961
-- ubuntu-uk@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
