[Computerbank] CBQ News

[Tony Joblin]

Dear Computerbank Queensland Supporter,

This is a quick email to bring you up to date on what has been happening
recently.

Working Bees
==========

We held our second working bee on Saturday the 15th of September. We made a
lot more progress this time around than our first meeting. We met at Ken
Groves house where we have stored a number of low-end Pentium class machines
in working condition. There are also a number of other monitors and boxes
there that are broken in some respect. Ken and Rod spent the day sorting and
testing the boxes, sorting out what works and what doesn't. Derek and I
spent the day doing network installs. Nearly all of our PCs have network
cards but no cd-roms. The theory is that if we can work out all the bugs,
installing over a network will be a lot easier that shuffling cd-roms
between machines. We did have some success in getting a network going and
installing some machines. We are still having some problems with some IBM
EtherJet network cards in about 1/2 of the machines. Initially we tried
Mandrake which had good support for the network cards but for some reason
refused to format/partition the hard drives. We then switched to RedHat,
more trouble detecting the NICs but at least we got it working.

Things to do next time
1. IBM EtherJet Cards - if someone can work out before the next meeting
if/how this NIC is supported under Linux that would be great.

2. Skinny install - A lot of our machines come with 1.2Gb hard drives. Our
goal is to install Linux (approx 1Gb for default RH install) plus Star
Office (approx 250Mb). Assuming we can trim enough fat from the default
RedHat install I believe that we can make a custom install script. If
someone would like to look into this before the next working bee that would
be great. Please drop me an email if you would like to working on this.

3. Upgrading working boxes. Given that some of our PCs don't work we should
look at stripping parts from those machines to upgrade some of the working
boxes. For example, while a lot of the PCs have 48Mb ram, some only have
32Mb ram, maybe we can upgrade the ram in some machines ?

Next Working Bee: probably Saturday the 29th September but I need to confirm
this date first - to be advised.

Career Employment Australia
====================

Career Employment Australia run work for the dole programs and do run some
programs in computer recycling and web development. They have buildings in a
number of places throughout Brisbane. We were put in touch with CEA through
some people on our list looking at starting a CB on the Gold Coast. Michael
and Ken have been talking with CEA up here in Brisbane and we are looking at
putting a proposal to them which would give us access to a building for
storage and workshop space.

Elorac House
==========

Yes we did put in an application to use Elorac House at Carole Park. I
haven't heard back yet and will ring them again today.

Tony Joblin,
President, Computerbank Queensland
Tel: 07 3371 1311 (working hours), Email: cbq-exec at dstc.edu.au
http://www.dstc.edu.au/CBQ/index.html


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