Mike's Planet Just a Big Ball of Gas

100 DEAD COMPUTERS BACK TO LIFE!

I just got an e-mail about a very cool Ubuntu related project that is happening in central Utah in Mid November. Kudos to the Snow College Open Source Software Club, Ubuntu Utah will definitely help if possible.

Something wonderful happened at Snow College down in Ephraim, UT, this semester: a few energetic students formed the Snow College Open Source Software Club.

To be chartered at Snow, a club needs to provide a service to the community.

On Saturday, November 14th, 2009, from 10:00am to 6:00pm the Open Source Club is going to bring 100 DEAD COMPUTERS BACK TO LIFE! This will all be happening in Humanities 122 on the Snow College campus. 150 E. College Ave. (Turn East at our traffic signal.)

You folks on this list know exactly how this is going to happen. People in the community will bring in their five to ten year old systems (or even older?) and we are going to restore these system with Ubuntu (or Xubuntu as necessary) and introduce John Q. Public to the over 20,000 free applications available to us in the Synaptic Package Manager. (People will be instructed to have cleaned off any files they hope to keep.) The miracle of Ubuntu and Open Source Software is about to reach Sanpete County in what we hope is a significant manner.

The members of this club are all relatively new to Ubuntu and the world of Open Source. We do not have skills with terminal commands, but we sure can pop in a Live CDs and bring systems up. The Install CDs seem to do all the heavy lifting.

It might be nice to have some assistance on this day from more experienced Ubuntu enthusiasts and so we would like to invite members of the Utah Ubuntu Team to come on down. The club should have a budget for food and the hopefully there will be live music. We're hoping for an all day party featuring Ubuntu and hopefully the end result will be that a lot of people walk home with their older system restored to Ubuntu -- or short of that, they will leave with the live CD and the phone number of a club member who can walk them through restoration of their computer. (In the spirit of Open Source, we are doing all of this free of charge, of course.)

Please come on down Saturday, November 14th, 2009, from 10:00am to 6:00pm and be a part of what we hope will be a real push toward educating the public about Open Source Software. We'd like to meet you and your expertise will likely be needed.

Thanks,
Chris