Thursday, August 12, 2010

The Koha Laptop Project

The idea is to build a portable 'server' that i can take to class to demo stuff and to bring to small labs so students can use it like a server. How well the second idea works out remains to be seen. The first step was to find a laptop that works with Linux and is cheap but powerful enough.

First attempt involved an HP dv6000 but i could never get the wireless to work. So that went to the flea market. I was tempted to use the dell D400 in the kitchen but it is underpowered for a server, fine as a firefox platform. I checked dell's canadian site but couldn't find any with Ubuntu anymore so i looked at the list of dell machines known to run linux.

The flea market yielded a very cheap Dell Inspiron 6400. Cheap because there is no battery, the Vista OS wouldn't boot, and it was missing an ALT key but those are not needed.

The machine is decently powered with 2 gig ram, 120 gig hard drive and a P4 duo core cpu. The seller told me it had intel pro wireless so it seemed a good choice.

I installed 9 but the wireless (the dreaded broadcomm 43xx - the seller was wrong) did not work so i upgraded to version 10 and it was able to see my WAP's.

Next - setup Koha