We use Ubuntu Linux as our $0 operating system. It is up to date and stable.

At ASCEND elementary School in Oakland from 2008 to 2012 I used discarded computers run on Linux and Open Office for a lab and in classrooms.

It was amazingly successful.

Ubuntu is very user friendly. It does not get all the viruses that Windows does. It has hundreds of Open source programs that are high quality and free.

www.ubuntu.com

Schools need these computers: Obsolesence is just a lack of imagination

“These computers are still good for something?” I hear all the time. YES! They are!

Discarded computers are our countries’ most wasted education resource. We starve for more resources in the midst of plenty.

I run them in the most up to date open source software and make them function in a classroom that teaches Word Documents, Spreadsheets, Power Point Presentations and Internet Research to 5th-8th grade students.

They have another life in them!

In my three years of doing this, I have seen that most computer failures are software problems and not hardware problems.

Run new software on them and they come back to life.

We take the parts that work, like memory, hard drives, video cards, CD-roms and network cards when a recycled computer fails to work as a whole. We use these parts to repair ones we can. When 3 of our computers become permanently unusable, we can usually build one that works out of the parts.