Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

We are making free computers for the freecycle group here.  Made one with 
BL3/Opera (for webmail) and 60 DOS games (200MB drive) for a 9 year old, 
and one with (ugh) Windows for daycare for playing educational Windows 
games, and am trying to talk someone else into linux for internet for 
their kids but they want "parental control" - can you add that in linux? 
If not, it is $15/mo for a local ISP that provides it.

One person wants internet and wordprocessing for his father and the 
ability to view photos and RTF files from his USB flash drive, and we 
decided to use Win98 for the printing (who knows what printer they have) 
rather than fiddle with ghostscript and/or CUPS and printing as user and 
trying to use svgalib and Xvesa also as user.  I also promised Adobe 
Acrobat 5.0 (which I have on CD already, saves downloading ghostscript, 
and the SW4.0 version is outdated and the newer ones need newer libx11).

But he is happy with the idea of linux for internet (no viruses of spyway) 
and viewing photos and RTF files (abiword).  He also wants to learn linux. 
We are setting it up to boot directly to icewm with a menu (Opera, links, 
linux, zgv, abiword, pdftopbm, netpbm).  He did not mention games.  What 
else should I put on for a complete newbie that will run in X or at least 
in an Xterm (probably with a black background).  If POP mail I can add 
Sylpheed (or they can use Opera mail).  We have until Thursday evening.

540MB = 40MB DOS (loop BL3, ramdisk BL2), 300MB Windows, 200MB linux.
He can store photos and documents in the Windows partition.

We ran spinrite on all our drives and discovered most of the 340-500MB 
ones were failing or dead.  The 1GB died during the test, a donated 2GB 
had bad bearings, and our 1.6MB died in use.  Apart from that, smaller 
drives save time because they partition and format and defrag (and test) 
faster.  They load Opera slower, but we can still be online in 1/10 the 
time of a new computer with XP and IE.

A local computer store called to let us know they have, for $25, 
500-600Mhz with 256-512MB RAM and (pc?)linux.  Just add monitor and 
keyboard.

Sindi

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org