What to tell 13 year old kids about Linux and Open Source?

[Mordecha Behar]

The video card was some generic onboard type. I don't have the motherboard
in front of me, so I can't check. (We threw it away).
I don't know the specifics, only that one day after a kernel upgrade the
screen did not work. At all. Not even a little bit.
For a while we kept up with the upgrades, rolling back again when it became
obvious that the new kernel won't support it. Eventually we gave up and
stopped upgrading the kernel.
It could be the monitor itself though. That was a huge old cathode ray tube
deal. We threw that away too, when the blue stopped working.
Anyway, old hardware is fun to play with for a while, but it eventually dies
its final death and we just move on.

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 11:51 AM, Shlomi Fish <shlomif at iglu.org.il> wrote:

> On Monday 10 Jan 2011 17:18:22 Mordecha Behar wrote:
> > 1) Most hardware elements are pretty idiot-proof. There's only one way to
> > plug them in, and only one place they can go.
> > But you can skip this step if you want. A  lot of people buy new
> computers
> > even when their old one isn't exactly broken, it's just not up to spec.
> > People want faster, more powerful computers, and they tend to throw away
> > slower, weaker ones. Ask around, I'm sure' you'll be able to turn up a
> > computer in good condition that is simple "too slow". Once Linux is
> > installed on it, that won't be a problem anymore.
> > 2) You could pick a distribution that has very good hardware support for
> > most of the "standard" components. Ubuntu and Mandriva are two that
> spring
> > to mind.
> > 3) Yes, it would be interesting. For the simple reason that they now have
> a
> > computer (or several) in their classroom that they can use. Furthermore,
> > there is the coolness factor. They took an old decrepit computer and
> turned
> > it into something useful, and rather powerful. All thanks to FOSS.
> >
> > As to Ubuntu, I had a Pentium III with 128 MB of RAM that was running
> > Ubuntu for years. It recently died from simple wear and tear on the
> > physical components. It worked very well, faster even than my XP
> computer.
> > Of course it had a very old video card, and that prevented us from
> > updating past kernel 2.6.19, but still, it worked very well.
>
> Out of curiousity, why didn't the very old video card work with kernels
> 2.6.20
> and above? Was compatibility dropped? Which video card was it? Didn't it
> support VESA mode? Finally - was it not possible to upgrade it to something
> newer and better supported?
>
> I'm asking because old kernels tend to accumulate many security
> vulnerabilities and are not recommended.
>
> Regards,
>
>        Shlomi Fish
>
> --
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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>
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>
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