From the blog:

http://blog.bworks.org/2008/03/saturday-update-march-15-2008.html

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Date: Sun, Mar 16, 2008 at 10:50 AM

Another good day at the shop. Nate took care of the childrens class
(Open Office Impress) with assistance from Josh. On a related note,
most of the phone messages were expressing an interest in registering
children for the Earn-A-Computer classes (Nate took those home with him,
and will do call-backs during the week). Dan shipped off the items sold
on eBay. The shop sold a few small items, a printer and a PDA. Matthew
did more work on the servers in the basement -- replacing bad batteries
and hard drives, determining which ones can be used and which ones need
to be scrapped. Craig worked on sorting through more of the triage
pile.

I brought back the box of hard drives which a donor had requested we
wipe -- thanks to hubby, who spent about 16 hours this past week running
the Linux "shred" command. There were a few drives that either weren't
recognized, or had the CLICK-THUNK-THUNK-WHIRR sounds, and two teensy
tiny SCSI (1.2GB) drives. Dan took care of those, by applying a more
primitive form of "shred", involving a hammer and a pry bar. For all
the other hard drives in the shop, we ran the "size/wipe" script on
them, then stored them in the "sized" bins, ordered accordingly.

Brad spent some time testing RAM (we found a great machine to use as a
RAM testing station; the mainboard has slots for both SDR-RAM and
DDR-RAM). Things got quite exciting at one point, when he put in one
stick of RAM, powered up the machine, and foul-smelling smoke erupted!
Quick power-down, open up all the doors to air out the nasty
electrical-fire smell, a review to make sure all volunteers knew where
the nearest fire extinguisher was (just in case!), and all was well.
The mainboard wasn't damaged, luckily.

Bill was doing some work on a fairly nice machine (P-III, 800MHz, 512
RAM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM) we are in the process of putting some form of
Ubuntu on -- this is the machine that Craig S. was working on late last
year -- it's been sitting around, waiting for us to have time to finish
it. Bill had put XUbuntu on it, which seems fairly nice if a bit odd in
spots. It was having difficulty with graphics (a user would open a
terminal and get kicked out of the GUI back to the login screen), which
were resolved by reconfiguring the xserver, and specifying dedicated
memory for the onboard Intel chipset. I also brought in the Ubuntu
install I was working on this week, and Matthew worked on post-install
tweaks (flash, etc). After some conversation, Bill decided he's going
to reinstall, using Ubuntu instead. That way, we are only supporting a
single version of Ubuntu for machines we sell, which will be a lot
simpler. We're also going to either order free CDs or burn copies, so
that the machines we sell with Ubuntu will come with an install disk.

Doc, no snow this week, and in fact we've had a few nice warm, sunny
days. The volunteer gardeners were working on the public space across
the street from the shop, cleaning up the winter debris so the spring
flowers can come up. We miss you!

See you all next Saturday,

Theresa