[dfs3] New contact in Spennymoor

[Barry Titterton]

Hi All,

I have made contact with a community centre in Spennymoor:-

http://www.spennymoorsettlement.co.uk/

They run training sessions for basic computer skills (Windows only)
every Tuesday and Wednesday afternoons. I had a short chat with the
tutor (Joan) to introduce DFS3 aims and principles. The tutor had heard
of Linux, which surprised me, but has no experience of using it on the
desktop. She says that there may be some interest within her mostly
elderly client base as several have Windows XP machines at home and do
not know what to do with them. The community centre has also been given
several old XP laptops from Teesdale council which they are not
currently using so I have installed Linux on one of the machines for
them to have a play and see what they think of it.

The machines are Dell Latitude D505 with Pentium 4M CPUs but they do
have 1Gb RAM, which is a bonus. They only have CD drives so, as I only
had Mint on DVD, I chose to install Lubuntu 14.04 whose ISO image still
fits onto CD. The install was not straight forward as the Pentium M CPU
does not support PAE features, however I was able to use the 'forcepae'
boot option from the liveCD to get a successful installation. A quick
Google search beforehand had suggested that I may also have had problems
with the Broadcom wireless but I was very pleased to find that Lubuntu
14.04 now has Broadcom support built in.

The Lubuntu image has some different packages to Mint so I also had to
install packages to enable support for restricted content, such as MP3
playback, as well Libreoffice, but I managed to finish the install just
in time to show it off to the tutor and two of the students. They seemed
interested, and the tutor said that she would give it a try. She also
said that they had a second Dell Latitude that I could convert to Linux,
as well a more modern Toshiba that I could also have a go at converting.
The Toshiba is a Win7 machine that was donated by BT but the tutor said
that, in the space of a few months, it became so slow as to be unusable.
This looks like quite a powerful machine so I may try Mint 17 with
Cinnamon on it to give them a taste of the variety of Linux desktops
that are available. I have arranged to go back in January.

One of the students also said that he had an XP desktop that he didn't
know what to do with. I handed out several DFS3 leaflets and asked the
tutor and students to pass them around to people who may be interested
(i.e. people with old XP machines), so we may get some interest in the
New Year.

Cheers,

Barry