Installfest generates 350 Linux computers for schools

On Saturday March 1st, Untangle and the Alameda County Computer Resource Center (ACCRC) organized the first of what is hoped to be many "Installfest for Schools" events. It took place at four San Francisco Bay area locations (San Francisco, Berkeley, San Mateo and Novato) and refurbished 350 older computers with Ubuntu for northern California schools.

The primary goal of the installfest was to give children in disadvantaged neighborhoods the same access to technology that students in wealthy school districts grow up with. However, the event was also about curbing waste. 132 million PCs were bought in the year 2000 alone and none of them can run Vista. But older hardware works great with GNU/Linux and extending the life of these PCs will keep thousands of tons of toxic electronic waste out of the landfill. And let's not forget about budgetary waste. With many states facing budget crises that will inevitably force deeper classroom spending cutbacks, why should our schools to spend their scarce resources on proprietary software licenses? In fact, cutbacks may create an incredible window of opportunity for the GNU/Linux desktop movement to establish itself within schools.

The installfest drew approximately 130 free and open source software community volunteers across the four locations. We started with over 1,000 older, discarded computers that had been collected by ACCRC through donations from the general public, local businesses and municipal governments. Some of the computers were smooth sailing: they met the hardware specification, had all of the necessary components and installed without any problems. Other computers had software install problems, but those were easy to solve because so many of the Bay Area's most hardcore free and open source software gurus participated and with their combined expertise, no error message went unattended to. The rest of the computers required a little more care, as many of them were missing a hard drive, NIC or enough RAM to run Ubuntu. Yet, by disassembling problematic boxes it was easy to form a pool of spare parts that could then be stitched back together to create working computers. The week after the installfest, ACCRC put the finished systems through a 72-hour burn-in test and we now have 350 computers that have already started being donated to schools.

The Ascend School in Oakland received the first batch of nine computers. Other schools that have received open source computers from the ACCRC include:

• Lockwood School (Oakland)
• Whittier Elementary School (Oakland)
• Casa Grande High School (Petaluma)
• Woodside Elementary School (Concord)
• KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy (San Francisco)
• Mission High School (San Francisco)

This event was about donating open source computers to schools in Northern California. However, ACCRC regularly donates to schools nationwide (and sometimes internationally). Schools in need of computers should fill out ACCRC's school application form [PDF].

Computer hardware and software specifications

The minimum specifications for each computer were an 800mhz processor (PIII or AMD), 256MB Ram and a 20 GB hard drive, but we were pleasantly surprised to find a handful of P4 processors in the mix as well. One location even received a batch of 6 dual core systems with elegant slim cases—who throws those out and what else are they looking to get rid of?—but ironically we couldn't install them during the event because they were only equipped with DMS-59 DVI ports that required special monitor cables.

Each system received a fresh copy of Ubuntu 7.10 desktop with the latest apt-get upgrade applied as of February 27, 2008. Because the computers were going into schools with little or no GNU/Linux expertise, it was important to try and create a positive first experience so we worked with Creative Commons to package samples of pictures from Flickr and music from Jamendo to show off the fun side of the donated computers. No Starch Press also donated PDF copies of Ubuntu for non-Geeks that were loaded on to each computer so that help for common support questions was never more than a click away.

Install specifications

Each location was set up with 10 to 40 workstations that had permanent keyboards, mice, monitors and cables so that the volunteers only had to move the desktops themselves back and forth. The process was started by booting from custom install CDs and the packages were applied over the network via apache http web servers. The custom CDs were optimized to make the Ubuntu OS installation as fast and easy as possible. Physically placing the CD into the drive and booting from disc was really all that was required because the additional content from Creative Commons and No Starch Press were bundled as Debian packages that were automatically installed via the network just like the other Ubuntu updates and patches.

The installfest networks were based on dual Pentium III servers with a RAID array and Gigabit network cards plugged into a 24-port Gigabit switch. It was important to have a fast setup because updating as many as 40 systems at once placed a heavy load on drives and network connections. Electricity was also a concern as most of the outlets available had 15 or 20 Amp circuits. Given the intensity of the installation/reboot workload and the relatively power inefficient CRT monitors, we drew the line at 5 workstations per 15 Amp circuit because an extra machine might have fit, but blowing the circuit breaker would have caused a big disruption—especially if the breaker happened to be in a locked closet.

Community goes the extra mile

With 130 volunteers showing up, Untangle and ACCRC really had a lot of help in pulling the Installfest for Schools off. However, the community did far more than just show up, our volunteers really went the extra mile to save the day on as we stumbled across a handful of unexpected hiccups. One particularly inspirational moment was when the San Mateo location ran out of computers, our volunteers drove their own cars across the Bay to pickup extra hardware rather than close the location early! We also owe a debt of gratitude to 3 members of the San Francisco Linux Users' Group (Christian Einfeldt, Jim Stockford and Daniel Mizyrycki), who worked long hours to set up and clean up that location.

We also received lots of help from free and open source software related organizations. Mozilla in particular really stepped up to the plate by blogging about the event and then bringing schwag and pizza for all 130 volunteers! But Mozilla wanted to get their hands dirty as well and Mozilla team members showed up to lend a hand at each location. Creative Commons and the No Starch Press helped put together content. Also, O'Reilly, OSI, the Linux Foundation, Sun and Canonical really helped get the word out with supportive blog mentions that encouraged participation as well.

Future plans

Moving forward, Untangle and ACCRC hope to continue organizing bigger and better Installfests for Schools. Our goal is to turn the one-time regional event into a distributed national event occurring on a regular basis. If we're able to find some friendly organizations to help out, we may even be able to go international. Stay tuned because you'll be hearing from us sooner rather than later about the next Installfest for Schools.

Anyone wishing to help should stay informed by signing up for the installfest mailing list. As we move more into a distributed national event, we need all of the help that we can get identifying local schools, old computer donors and feet on the street volunteers to make sure everything goes smoothly. That work will be coordinated on the mailing list.

[ Andrew Fife, of Untangle, is one of the organizers of the project. ]

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What a cool idea.  I'll definitely keep my eyes out for the next event.

What happens once these computers are donated to the schools?  Do the schools take them over
100% or does the ACCRC try to offer some support?  Just wondering what happens when a hard
drive or PSUs fails, that sort of thing.

The ACCRC warranties the boxes for 12 months in that they will fix or replace hardware
failures.  After 12 months, schools just need to fill out another application form and
reapply.

Hi, 

I can't answer for all of the schools, but I can tell you that one of the schools, a public
middle school in San Francisco, where I am the lead sys admin, uses these boxes as desktops
and thin clients.  Some of the boxes have 512 MB of RAM.  Those are work stations.  The rest
are thin clients.  All, of course, are Free Open Source Software boxes.  My thanks on behalf
of the kids and the school to James Burgett and his colleagues at ACCRC.org and Andrew Fife
and his colleagues at Untangle.com for making this event a huge success.

Christian Einfeldt,
Producer, Digital Tipping Point

Oh, I forgot to add one important thing.  We are in the process of giving computers to kids to
take home!!  Our goal for the school is to make sure that every child has a computer at home.
We have already given out 5 boxes to kids.  It is a slow process, because it entails having the
parents come in on an individual basis for training.  We are in the process of having a group
training for the parents, but that takes a lot of work and organizing, and the school is
preparing for the massive standardized testing that happens in the month of April, and all the
teachers, students, and staff are focused on that training right now.  

Christian Einfeldt

To run Mozilla or Openoffice, 512 MB would be better.
As to CPU, my low limit is 500 MHz. Current software systems feel better from adding RAM
rather from speeding up the CPU. I have quite a loaded server+router host with PIII-500 and
768 MB RAM. The only bottleneck is CPU when it comes to full-speed PPTP traffic decoding.

The extra ram definitely helps and we'd love to bump the standard install up to 512 ram, but
keep in mind these are systems that have been thrown out by their original owner so we can't
be too picky.