Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

Just today, I received in the mail some Sony Vaio Picturebook laptops, courtesy of Gavin’s regular potlatch program. My goal was to bring them to the Linux geek out at NTC, and have people play with Linux installs on them. But, I realized that I had somewhat of a challenge on my hands.

Linux is supposed to be easy to install and use. And, in most situations, it is. And, if I had a USB CD-ROM drive, it would be, since it seems from the BIOS of the Vaio’s that they can boot from USB external devices. But, the computers are networked, so it would seem - there must be some easy way, right?

Debian comes to the rescue. They have a site, with the URL: http://goodbye-microsoft.com, which is a link to a windows .exe file, which is a simple, sweet Debian installer. It works pretty well (at this moment, I’m now downloading and installing the base system.) The one snag I hit (not unusual) is that originally, I was using the wireless cards for networking, but the basic Debian system didn’t recognize them. So I switched to the very standard ethernet PC cards that Gavin so thoughtfully included, and bingo - everything works.

My next step, after installing the basic Debian system, is to switch the install to Ubuntu. That’s easier than it sounds. Changing one file (/etc/apt/sources.list) and running a few commands, should do the trick. We’ll see…

Anyway, if you’ll be at NTC, come by and see where I got to. The geekout will be on Thursday at 3:30.

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