Category: News

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Download, burn, and boot: doing disaster IT with a shelter lab LiveCD build

Ars Technica put up another thorough article detailing the needs of computer stations and labs setup after hurricane Katrina for the survivors. Hannibal goes over what he learned, talks about current solutions, and details what needs to be improved.

One of the most unexpected and least visible aspects of hurricane Katrina’s aftermath was the critical role that information technology played in the relief effort. Throughout the Gulf Coast, shelter workers and residents built and used improvised computer labs consisting of donated, Internet-connected PCs and printers.

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USB smart drives set for lift off

PCPro has an article about how USB “smart” drives, or USB flash drives with a bootable OS like Knoppix installed, are going to take of in the near future. Would have been a better article if there wasn’t a giant flash ad covering half of it.

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World of knowledge in your hands

The Sydney Morning Herald has an article about a developer combining the Wikipedia and Knoppix DVD.

King downloaded the entire English-language version of co-operatively produced online encyclopedia Wikipedia to a readable DVD-ROM to allow it to be accessed from a computer without an internet connection. He will soon post the project online and invite others to help him develop the concept.

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Linux in Italian Schools, Part 3: DidaTux | Linux Journal

Linux Journal has an article about the use of open source software in Italian Schools. One teacher has tailored a LiveCD to focus on education, and is fighting to have open source mentioned alongside the teaching of proprietary software.

First of all, she notes, this is software that can be installed, modified and shared freely, without choosing between the risk of heavy fines and the use of expensive licenses that software companies use to lock in millions of end users.

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LiveCDs Helping with Katrina Disaster Recovery

PublicWebStations.com is helping to setup Public Web Stations for the people affected by Hurricane Katrina. These stations are run off a modified Damn Small Linux LiveCD and allow web access to various disaster relief information websites. They are also assisting in organizing donations of computer hardware, and with the DSL’s requirements of a 486 with 16 MB of ram, a lot of unused computers can be made useful again.

“A working web station would take no more than 5 minutes to set up, and requires no ongoing maintenance except in the case of hardware failure,” Hargadon continued. “In case of any difficulties, the machine is just rebooted.”

Ars Technica has a related story, but addresses the problem of FEMA’s IE-only disaster registration website.

The issue isn’t only security. XP hardware requirements, while not impressive by today’s standards, rule out using some donated hardware as well. Furthermore, legitimate copies of Windows also cost money, and relief workers are trying to stretch their dollars as far as they can go.

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Upgrade to free software for italian schools

NewsForge reports that 20,000 LiveCDs will be distributed to students and teachers in Italy. Less than three weeks ago there was an announcement that 64,000 LiveCDs would be distributed to students in France. If only I was given a Linux CD while in school, I’m sure my first computing years in front of BASH would have had a better impact on me then all the time I spent in DOS.

about 20 thousand live-cd will be delivered to students and teachers, with the collaboration of Alpikom [7]. All the students and families will have, for free, the same software environment and all the applications used in the computer classes at school.