Local Green Builds Computer Lab for Neighborhood
May 7, 2002
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Tom Brown, long time member of the St. Joe Valley Greens, installed a computer learning lab in the the Salvation Army church at South and Carroll streets in South Bend, IN.
The computer laboratory is a demonstration of diverting obsolete computer equipment from the toxic waste stream and making it useful again by adding the GNU/Linux operating system.
The South Bend Salvation Army church runs a neighborhood latch-key child care program in their basement. The staff wanted computers for the children to use to educate and entertain themselves.
The church wants to open the lab to the neighborhood this summer.
Church officials applied to the United Way of St. Joseph County for ten computer systems and prepared a small room in their basement to house the computers.
At the same time Tom was looking for a site to demonstrate a community technology center project he had conceived. Jan Brown, Tom's wife, suggested he contact the Salvation Army.
The church jumped at the chance to put something useful in the computer room. They had waited about six months, and the donated equipment had not arrived.
So Tom installed a server and four workstations and connected them in a local area network. Then he connected the local network to the Internet using a telephone line.
A few months before this equipment was ready for the liquidator or the landfill.
Shortly after the demonstration network was in place six of the ten computer systems from United Way showed up so Tom added them to the local network.
The six donated machines can boot Windows 98 from their local hard drives or, by inserting a floppy disk, boot the GNU/Linux operating system over the network from the server.
Software from the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) and the K-12/LTSP make this possible. Some of the old computers have no disk drives at all. They are converted into diskless terminals which boot off the server.
The church bought speakers for the Windows-ready computers and asked church members to donate used computer games on CD-ROMs.
Mike Cook from Michiana Linux Users Group (MLUG) volunteers to help administer the network.
Now the latch-key kids can play educational and entertaining games on the multi-media PCs.
When the computers boot GNU/Linux, children and adults can access word processing programs, spreadsheets, databases, presentation programs and even programming languages residing on the server.
Users can surf the Internet over the local network.
Obsolete computers are a growing problem in the toxic waste stream. Free Geek, a community tech center in Seattle, WA, has recycled 93 tons of computer equipment in the past eighteen months.
Tom and Mike are taking steps to create a similar recycling program in St. Joseph county. The county Solid Waste Mgmt. Dist., MLUG, the SJVGreens and the United Religious Community all endorse the recycling project.
St. Joe Valley Greens, South Bend, IN