Re: What can I do with six new publicly available computers?
Paul E Condon wrote:
Where are you located? (What part of the World?)
Europe, Slovenia
What is the culture and level of education of your intended audience?
It depends. Most of them are just common users of windows. But this is
not a problem as we are planning to make courses to teach people how to
use computers and not to be affraid of Linux.
At the moment we are only offering web access. We would like to create a
place where people will come and do some creative stuff with computers.
What exactly depends on people itself. We already have video editing
studio and trying to build sound studio. Nothing fancy just the basic
things. We want to offer the equipment we have to as much people as
possible, so at least few people will actualy use the equipment to
create something and not just surf the internet.
Can you find,
locally, a Linux Users Group whose members can offer local support?
There is a user group 100 km away. They might give us some help, but we
should first do the basics.
Is support for languages other than English important to your
organization? What languages? The 'distribution' of Linux that you use
should, of course, be Debian, and most of the computers should have
Debian Sarge/stable installed. (You and your local user community can
consider Etch/testing on a few machines after you have seen some
pattern of useage.)
Language is Slovenian but this shouldn't be a problem as I use Debian at
home and even managed to setup Debian to understand Chinese.
In the beginning of the project I was just a webmaster, but then our
computer expert left, and suddenly I became the "expert". The computers
are already running Mandrake, but now that I'm in charge I will move
them to Debian since I use it at home and I'm more used of it.
Clusters of Linux computers are very common, but they require that you
have a level of computer sophistication that I don't detect in reading
your email. I am not expert on video editing software, but I would be
surprised if any video editing package that wants to be taken seriously
did not already support running on a cluster. (Excepting, of course,
stuff for the Windows market where really awful software wants to be
taken seriously.)
From the replies I got so far I got the better picture of clustering.
I will abandon the thought about clusters for a while and read few books
first to clear the basics.
Give us some idea of the hardware configurations of these computers,
ram, harddisk size, clock rate, video display monitor spec.s, etc.
I'm not 100% sure but they were bought few months ago and CPU should be
3Ghz, Ram 512, disk 60Gb, video card: no idea, 17" monitor. Quite good
stuff, better than anything I have at home.
--
Mitja Podreka
http://mitja.kizej.net
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