Robert Pogson

I have been working at this place for three months and have made a lot of improvements:

• set up a router
• set up several servers
• made clean images of XP updated from SP1 with FAT to current with NTFS for several types of PC
• increased network speed from 10 to 100 mbits/s
• added gigabit/s links for servers
• added Sophos firewall/malware protection

Still it is not working. Clean machines that I installed in these three months are coming back to me. Even my own machine that I use to connect to a GNU/Linux terminal server slowed down. That was the last straw. I cannot afford the time to keep fixing XP. Last night I had an opportunity to shut down that other OS on another PC.

A teacher who is doing a fine job managing some rowdy junior high school students has lately been working late on his PC. He told me recently that it had lost its connection to the Internet. I looked at it and indeed, it no longer knew about the Atheros chip. There was no sign of malware so I expect it was some automatic update clobbered the DLINK installation. There were .DLLs missing, too. I told him I would install GNU/Linux and it would hold its configuration. He said, “OK”. The guy is only recently a PC user so I doubt he understood the implications but his needs were simple. He said he had no files to back up.

Because his PC had a flash card reader that was rare, I swapped a PC from the pool with XP. I did a base install of Debian Lenny using the netinst CD. Because he had only 256 MB RAM, I did not want anything extra. The machine would not boot past the USB keyboard so I fetched a PS/2 keyboard for the installation. Responding to prompts, I created a user for him and none for the students. I gave him a stiff password. I set up the proxy for APT pointing it at our proxy server which caches packages. The installation was routine. At the first boot the wireless card was recognized but not configured. I did the installation on 100baseT cable. I added minimal software with
apt-get install xfce4 xpdf xserver-xorg-i810 xdm iceweasel vlc abiword kwifimanager

I added the lines
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet dhcp
essid default
mode Managed

to /etc/network/interfaces and commented out the eth0 entries. Wireless then worked and we had about 5 mbits/s or more. The location in my lab was not good for reception.

The X server would not start when I moved it to the classroom. The mouse was not seen by the BIOS being USB and the box being old. I added
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice" to /etc/X11/xorg.conf after seeing that there was a /dev/input/mice file. X then started and I logged in as root to download and install Google-Chrome browser and Flashplayer from Adobe.com. I had to create /opt/google/chrome/plugins/ to hold libflashplayer.so link. Everything worked. “It sure is fast!”, he said, observing over my shoulder. It certainly was. We used vlc and Google-Chrome to browse some radio stations. Peter, Paul and Mary singing “The Hammer Song” brought tears to our eyes.

I added his HP Laerjet 4 printer from 1991 with a PCL5 driver and it was good. We found the copy very dirty and the drum was visibly dirty so we put in a new cartridge. The second page was clean. I dropped in later in the evening and he was having fun. No problems. I can add a few apps as a result of his experiences and have a good image to roll out to the rest of the XP machines as needed.