Last Friday Christian Einfeldt put a call out to the Partimus Discussion list asking for some help moving the laptop donation from Intuit from his office (where they were delivered) to the school. I volunteered.
I picked up Christian around 12:30 at the KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy and drove out to his office. The laptop boxes were huge, and I think we bent the laws of physics in our efforts to get them into our 2-door car along with 2 flat panel monitors and the cart we used to carry them.
The laptops are all Thinkpads, a mix of X61s and T43s. The hardware could do with some cleaning up due to some dust buildup, but it should be no problem to get Ubuntu running on them. I grabbed two of them to give to James Howard who is working on setting up an imaging server using Ubuntu 12.04 rather than the old 10.04 which we’re still using on many of the systems at the schools, free education on free software!
I took a quick picture of the two laptops while they were staying at my home this week:
After dropping the laptops off at Creative Arts Charter School we ordered a pizza and headed back to KIPP. At KIPP we finished running the ethernet cables and applying updates to the Ubuntu 10.04 systems in a 5th grade math classroom. I was delighted to learn that the computers in that room are in part being used to view Khan Academy Math videos.
It was 5PM by the time we finished running the cables and doing the system updates and we had to leave the building. In all a very productive day. Christian also wrote about it over on the Partimus blog, along with work last weekend that I couldn’t help with (other obligations last Saturday): 30 hours of work in just a few days.