Used Technology

Computer Recycling is now selling refurbished Inkjet Printers. We're selling the Inkjet Printers as tested, with cartridges, but without ink or with very low ink. We've been working with a local ink refilling shop very close to us, BTI Solutions, in order to test printers. We've started to maintain a local database of information about which printers easily work with Ubuntu Linux and which ones don't, so not only are we testing the printers for fitness, we're making sure we support Linux as much as we can.

At The Working Centre's Computer Recycling we offer computers with Ubuntu Linux installed (System Unit, Monitor, Keyboard, power cords, mouse, everything you need to get going) from $30+. Systems start at PIII 600MHz with 256MB RAM and a 10GB hard drive, basic, but enough to get started. So far we've been doing stock installs of Ubuntu 8.10, which leaves me customizing the distribution by installing things like codecs, autologin, etc. I've been working on setting up a Drupal portal for volunteers to learn to do these things. Once the portal is done I'm going to make it available both in our remaster of Ubuntu and here online.

The other day we built a multimedia computer for the shop . I chose Mandriva Linux because I wanted to provide volunteers with a different experience from the typical Ubuntu Linux they're used to. And it was an experience for me. I've worked quite a bit with Red Hat/Fedora, SuSE, Debian, and Ubuntu, but not so much with Mandriva. I actually found myself a bit lost when it came to package management. I was unfamiliar with urpmi. So I did a bit of research and found a few interesting links. See the story I wrote here: http://www.charlesmccolm.com/content/helpful-mandriva-linux-links