The story of one educator's crusade to increase technology access at his school.
Three years ago, inner-city teacher Dave Prentice got hold of 17 used computers-all without operating systems. A local bank donated the old 486 and Pentium machines, but wiped the hard drives clean for security reasons. Without an operating system, the hardware amounted to some very large paperweights.
Adding the computers to his math classroom would nearly double the number of PCs that were in Warren Easton High School, a predominantly African-American school in a working-class New Orleans neighborhood. But the district didn't have the money to help Prentice set up a bunch of Windows-based computers. So Prentice turned to a free version of Red Hat Linux and before the end of the school year had 14 computers on the Internet-making his the only classroom in his school with more than one machine connected to the Web. Prentice also spent about $1,000 of his own money for the hard drives, network interface cards, memory, cables, hubs, and other items needed to set up a computer lab with the machines.
A lot has changed since then. Prentice started teaching chemistry this year, and his new classroom's tiered seats and too few electrical outlets make it impossible to run his computers, which now number 19. And the new math teacher wasn't interested in learning about Linux, so as a result the computers have been sitting in cold storage.
In the meantime, Prentice has been experimenting with turning the computers into thin clients. He plans to use one of his computers as the server, loading it with the Linux network operating system. "The challenge is getting the first client running. Once you do, the rest are a piece of cake because they're all about the same," says Prentice. "Linux is very good once it's running, but getting it up is user vicious."
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