The Pipestone Senior Center has three PC's for the ninety seven members to use for email, web browsing and mostly playing cards. The second set of donated Pentium III machines were installed by me back in 2006. These replaced three machines that were 386 and 486 vintage, running Windows 95 and 98. Today I brought them three Dell 270 towers. Pentium 4's with 1 GB RAM and a 80GB hard drive. Dell was kind enough to install new motherboards in all three because of substandard leaking capacitors. These had seen service for nearly five years and were not sufficient to run a new financial application. The machines all had a OEM winderz XP tag but that will not be used. After a new manager started this January she wanted to get the machines up and running. Due to my time demands I cannot babysit these machines. It was decided to install Ubuntu to the machines and just let them be.
Three machines need three flavors of Ubuntu. One is straight Ubuntu 10.10 one is Mint, and one is Kubuntu. All are patched to 10.10. The hardware was detected and installed automatically. All have the HP LaserJet 4 driver installed and printing to the Dell 1710 printer on a network print server.
Web surfing is done with Mozilla Firefox, the standard weather add-ons were configured for Pipestone. Old people like to see weather information and news papers. We were able to install PySol and everyone is really happy with the speed and options. There is some interest in Skype, so we may look into installing that on these boxes too.
The overall speed and performance of the machines in amazing when you compare them to the identical Dell box running winderz.
These machine will become very busy this February. During tax time the members have tax assistants, helping them to efile taxes with these machines.
Also let me add that this building is on the National Register Historic Places. This was a Carnegie Library and built from locally quarried Sioux Quartzsite. In 2009 the County of Pipestone included it in a fiber build-out and this building has network connections to the internet running at ten mega-bit. http://www.cardcow.com/images/set261/card00008_fr.jpg
