Helping Victims Become Survivors 6
March 9th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Regular readers of this Journal know that I work as a full-time volunteer at a domestic violence center and shelter.
One of the many tasks that I do for that organization is configure old, donated PCs (with monitors, mice, keyboards and printers), to give to DV survivors to use, to help them rebuild their lives.
Unable to find a Linux distro that would work on them at the time — and not knowing enough about how to support Linux on other people’s PCs at the time — I installed and configured Windows on the first batch of PCs late last fall.
After one of those Windows PCs came back a few days later, already infected with 39 viruses, I figured out how to get Linux to work on it instead, and sent it back out to that survivor’s home as a safe, secure, Internet-ready Linux system.
Since then, I’ve installed and configured Linux on every donated computer that I configure. Through a lot of trail-and-error, I discovered that I prefer to use Puppy Linux on the donated PCs because it runs on older hardware, comes with a great selection of software, and is easier to install and configure the way I want than any of the other Linux distros that I’ve tried, such as AntiX, Slitaz, Damn Small, TinyMe and Mepis.
I feel really good about what I think is a very noble use for old PCs — taking hardware that would have otherwise ended up in landfills, and using it to help change people’s lives by installing completely free and open-source operating systems and applications on it.
But old PCs can serve many other functions, too. For some great ideas, see Resurrect Your Old PC.
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Tags:
Domestic Violence, Ecology, Freedom, Inspirational, Internet, Linux, Personal, Security, Survivors, Tech Support, Windows