| A cybercafé for thirty quid? Farcical or feasible? |
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| Written by Garfield Lucas | |
“10 pc Cybercafé for 30ukp!!!!”That was the triumphant claim of a recent post on the Puppy Linux users forum…  Looks like XP but it's really Linux Too good to be true?So we contacted Robert Simpson, author of the post and director of Lincolnshire-based IT firm Ecomoney Ltd - a social company. Robert responded, “Come and see for yourself.” A few weeks later Susannah Dora Majlati (Angel in the DEOSS forum) and I drove to Scunthorpe to meet Robert at the cybercafé. This is set up in the Riddings Drop In Centre, a local community centre about 2km from the centre of Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. Located in a very poor part of the country, this project attempts to bring reliable modern computing to people that otherwise simply could not afford it. Old dogs & new tricksAt first glance, the PC’s look like a batch of 1999-vintage PC’s running Microsoft Windows XP, complete with the ubiquitous “Bliss” Teletubbies-style wallpaper, loathed the world over by XP users. But closer inspection reveals a little penguin on the “Start” button. This was because what we were looking at was not Micro$oft Windows at all. It was Linux. But this was not any old Linux. This was Puppy, a modern, GNU-derived Linux distribution, designed specifically to run well on minimal hardware. And Robert has quite intentionally configured these machines to resemble XP. He explained, “Most of our users have no computer knowledge, Linux can sound frightening. Most people using our machines don’t even realise they are not running ’doze.” Robert’s cybercafé consists of ten PC’s with a mere 192 MB RAM and relatively pedestrian 566 to 700 MHz microprocessors. Yet these elderly boxes motor along at a breathtaking speed. Bad dogDrop-in centre users range in age from under three to over seventy-three. Assembling enough commercial Windows-based software to keep such a wide range of folks amused would be prohibitively expensive. You would need to buy ten licences for each piece of software you chose. And you would need to buy ten MS Windows licences too – as if Mr Gates isn’t rich enough already! And that assumes one could still buy a version of M$ Windows, sufficiently old to run on such elderly hardware in the first place e.g. Windows 98. Of course Windows 98 is now entirely unsupported. Good puppy Riddings Drop In Centre And good for the planetThe machines used to belong to a local school. When it decided to buy new computers it needed to dispose of the old ones. Nowadays one can’t just chuck old computers in a skip and forget about them. They have to be disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. And this is not cheap, roughly £1000 ($1960 US @ 2007-01-15) in this case. Needless to say the school was delighted for Robert and his chums to dispose of them for nothing! Add that to the fact that puppy and all the software that comes bundled with it is open source and free of charge too. Apparently the £30 was actually spent on printer cartridges, four plug adaptors, a couple of longer networking cables, a couple of packs of blank CD's and some cheap headphones. Hidden costs?Yes, there was one – time. Riddings is Robert’s first Puppy-based cybercafé. He admits it took him around two weeks actually setting it all up. He hastens to add that setting up the cybercafé put him on a steep learning curve. He argues that he would be much quicker second time around – perhaps a day or two. Running dogs Putting Puppy on a lappy ConclusionAside from Robert’s infectious enthusiasm which left my head spinning as I drove back south, this trip really opened my eyes to the possibilities of Windows-free computing. Consequently, I now have three pre-2000 PC’s, including my one-time pride and joy, a 1998-vintage Hong Kong-purchased Palmax 1000, all happily running Puppy Linux and all behaving as if they were brand new machines. And they are much less likely to get hit with the worms, viruses and other nasties that they did when they ran M$ Windows! I'd just add that before any reader discards a perfectly good but elderly PC just because it won't run the latest Micro$oft Windoze, try installing Puppy. You'd be barking mad not to! Free download of puppy Linux... |
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| Last Updated ( Monday, 19 February 2007 ) |
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