Update on our Community Computer Upcycle Project

2025-08-13

It’s been a slower start than I’d hoped for but we are making a bit of progress. I’m going to take the long view that a slow start is better than no start and if I keep at it, it will grow. Here’s a progress report.

Three weeks ago I had my first request for an assisted GNU/Linux install on a Dell Latitude laptop. We met-up at the library and the install was done in thirty minutes. There were a couple odd hiccups after the reboot. His was the first upgrade that did not just reboot into the new Mint OS. Instead the computer was looking for the usb drive. We had to reboot into the bios and tell it to use the internal drive. Upon reboot we were greeted with an error: “Invalid partition table”. I did a search and found a temporary fix: hitting the enter key contiuned the boot and there were no issues. He didn’t have time to delve further into the problem but it’s in my notes and to-do to look into it further for him and for future installs.
Two weeks ago we had seven laptops donated over the course of a few days.
Last Thursday I did an introduction to GNU/Linux and Free Software presentation at the local library. Download the presentation in ODP(Open Document Presentation). Unfortunately it was not well attended with only two folks showing up. I don’t mind, the two that showed up were really interested. I’m thinking of it as a practice run and now the presentation is done so I’ll try again in the near future and use the same presentation. In the meantime I’m considering follow-up presentations on a range of topics related to privacy, security and free software.
This week I got back into town to begin upgrading the donated laptops to GNU/Linux Mint with Xfce. Each took about 30 minutes to upgrade followed by an additional 10-15 minutes to apply updates after rebooting. Easy peasy! I’ve got 4 of 7 done and ready for adoption by new users. These are all 6+ years old with only 4 to 8GB of memory and hard drives rather than SSDs. Even with those constraints they seem to run fairly well, certainly usable for general computing.
A fun tidbit: A part of this project is being housed at a local non-profit that supports people in recovery and while I was upgrading the laptops one of the staff asked if I could add the network printer to the desktop computer we’ve set-up for their clients to use. I opened up the printer utility and the printer was already there and offered to install extra software when I selected it. I did that and it followed up with an offer to do a test print which I did. Time to set-up and test print was 10 seconds. I'd guess it's not always that simple but it's another data point to illustrate that GNU/Linux often works out of the box.
Last, I’ve scheduled 2 days at our library for the last week of August to do assisted GNU/Linux upgrades. I’ve got it up on the library website and am hoping that our little local paper will mention it this week. I’ll be there and am hoping some folks will show up!

Next to do

Finish upgrades on remaining 3 donated laptops.
I’ll be waiting on the nonprofit staff to arrange for the adoptions then we’ll sort out dates to meet and do a new user orientation and account set-up.
Schedule dates in September for assisted installs at the library.
Set a topic and schedule a date in September for another presentation at the library.

I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

Share this post

❤️