Babbage's Basement : Linux Computers

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home sciencenter babbage who? mac pc linux other einstein's attic macseum trautmann's office treasures contact donations schedule events location directions volunteers projects -internal- Regular Hours: Wed & Sat 10am-3pm

Computer Rescue, Restoration, and Reuse Center, a program benefitting the Sciencenter of Ithaca

L i n u x C o m p u t e r s

Sample System

Dell Optiplex GX1p

Pentium II 450MHz processor, 128MB memory

13GB hard drive, CD-ROM, floppy

ATI 3D Rage Pro Video adapter

USB 1.0, Ethernet

Keyboard, Mouse

Gateway 17" monitor

Knoppix Linux

System price: $75 (as of March, 2007)

Unix/Linux Background Info

Due to almost zero customer interest, Babbage's Basement no longer attempts to sell Unix workstations and does not accept them as donations without prior arrangement.

Instead we feature Linux on commodity PCs. There are a number of PCs in the showroom that have Linux installed. We install Ubuntu Linux and Knoppix.

Babbage's uses Linux internally for several purposes:

On the PC that brokers our wireless connection to the Internet.
This old Pentium I machine works as a router, firewall, and DHCP server. The radio link itself is provided by Lightlink.

On a Sun machine in the back of our showroom that volunteers and customers can use to browse the WWW.
Unlike Windows which poses a security risk when used this way, the Linux box is not invadable by viruses targeted at Windows.

It is more difficult (and less effective, simply because there are fewer Linux boxes in the world) to write a virus that does something to a Linux system. Our use of a Sun computer is a second level of insulation since the first future Linux viruses will aim at PCs :^)

To test printers, scanners, and hard drives.

As a one-diskette emergency fixer for Windows.

As the first tester of some incoming PCs.
We run Knoppix or Ubuntu from a "live" CD which can boot the computer at startup power-up and does not need to be installed to the hard drive. If the startup completes successfully, we use a Linux utility program to check the integrity of the hard drive. Installing Windows solely for the purpose of such testing can take hours and would be frustrating if the hard drive failed in the middle of the procedure.

Beside PCs and Sun Ultras used by Babbage, Linux will also run on PowerMacs, including ones that are too old to run OS X.

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