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Last year MBLUG participated in the nationwide (international?) Linux Demo Day on February 17th (coinciding with the release of Windows 2000). Most of the computers at MBHS are Wintel or Mac, as the county has had some anti-Linux sentiment. We wanted to demonstrate for the students and teachers that Linux is completely viable operating system. Thanks to all the companies who donated products to Demo Day.


Everyone standing around in the Magnet Lab. The two guys with long hair and the Red Hat Revolution tshirts are MBLUG members, Ben Roberts on the left and Ben Trahan on the right.


This is a Macintosh G3 which we installed Yellow Dog Linux on, and is now the official MBLUG machine. We call it GFree. One thing we learned from this experience is that Macintosh computers are very fast, it's just the operating system that's slow. A G3 running Linux is an incredibly fast machine. The only problem we had was buggy USB (the USB support is taken from the development kernels). We can't wait for OS X.


While Compaqs are not the easiest computers to install Linux on, this one happened to be sitting in our network admin (Mr. Hammond)'s office. He decided that we could use it to demo an installation on, and as a side benefit, he now has a Linux machine in his office. We started out by demonstrating Red Hat's install prodcedure, and then while the packages were installing, we moved on to demonstrate applications available for Linux. To the right and left of the Compaq, you can see the IBM X Terminals which are connected to binx when it's "in house" (long story). By the way, this whole thing couldn't have been done without Mr. Hammond's help.

Originally a machine for a programming club called Silver Arrow, we used the Silver Arrow machine to demonstrate Star Office and Blender for Demo Day. This machine is a hardware hacker's delight, notice the spare floppy drive on the desk, the case off, and assorted wires sticking out everywhere.


The MBHS webpage viewed from Netscape on GFree.