[wirelesstoronto-discuss] Toronto Free-Net Dialup Linux Computer "Remarkable Offer" Evaluation Friday Feb15

[Ken McCracken]

Friday at the TFN Office. 6pm. Free (as in Free Beer) Beer [A tasty
organic Munich Helles lager of my own making] and chips and/or cookies
and juice. Let me know if you will be coming.

..........

TFN has a fairly large quantity of older computers warehoused. We are
configuring them with Linux Ubuntu and dialup modems to connect to
Toronto Free-Net lines. The idea is to sell for less than $100 (as
well to a lesser extent give them away) including a one year connection to
TFN.


Iain Calder wrote:
   > we will meet at the TFN office to
  >  try them out, and to see whether having a lighter window
  >  manager makes a noticeable difference in GUI response time
  >  on the hardware configuration which we will be giving to
  >  our new members.  This is questionable because we expect
   >  people to use heavy applications like OpenOffice.org
   >  and firefox.
  >
   >  Mike, acting on earlier TFN technical direction, has
   >  already invested time customizing the KDE GUI with TFN
  >  logos, wallpaper, etc, and setting up a cookie-cutter
  >  procedure for imaging boxes that way.  We originally
   >  chose KDE because of its visual similarity to MS-Windows,
  >  but later people thought the systems were performing
  >  too slowly and the project stalled.  If we decide that
   >  Xfce makes these computers seem significantly snappier,
  >  we will have to decide whether it is worth repeating the
   >  customization work for Xfce before we go to market.
  >

I have been listening in on the xubuntu developers mailing list
and it seems they are embroiled in arguing whether they are aiming for
a lightest or just a lighter ubuntu or both.

Some questions arise out of our process to test the actual hardware's
soundness, so suggestions on that would be welcome too.

Ken