NTR Laptop Project Update
Our NTR Laptop Project has been going on for several months now. Here’s an update from the project lead, Kevin Valentine:
The NTR Laptop Project has been moving along smoothly. I don’t have any hard numbers right now but we’ve sorted through about 30-40 laptops. Out of those we have about 10 that are almost ready to be sold at NTR’s thrift store. Before we do that they need to be stress tested – yet another stage in our refurb process. Last Saturday meeting was the first time we tested our new testing process. It went something like this:
- several volunteers were in another room powering up laptops and checking for minimal functionality
- another group in the laptop room pulls hard drives and searches for power supplies
- one person writes DSL images to the hard drives using our fancy new Python script (takes about 1 minute per drive)
- as the first group produces laptops that are function, the new imaged drives get placed in them and tested further
Initially the desktops were off limits to us. However, at the last meeting we were approached by one of NTRs employees, Chuck. He showed me and Jim a batch of about 20 desktops that we could install some flavor of Ubuntu onto. We don’t know all the specs yet but we think they range from 500 MHz to 1GHz. We’ll find out soon.
For those you haven’t been following along, please check out the project’s wiki page for more details: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PennsylvaniaTeam/CommunityOutreachTeam/NtrLaptopProject
