Have the CESA 17 project been cancelled, you may wonder? No! Despite a very silent blog during the last couple of months, we have been very productive. A short summery: flight tickets have been purchased and the computers are ready to be shipped to South Africa. Now to the longer summary.
Last time, we reported that we had installed the operating system Ubuntu on all computers and started cleaning them and removing stickers. Since then, we have received more computers a couple of times, and done the same thing with those. In addition to that, new stickers with the logos of our dear partners, Opera and Findwise, have been sticked to them.
After the installation of Ubuntu, it was time for the offline version of the English Wikipedia. Since many schools in South Africa does not have an Internet connection, this is a valuable source of knowledge. As you might know, Wikipedia is quite big and installing the offline version on one computer takes around six hours. Since we have 120 machines, it would take 30 straight days to install it from one USB stick on all computers. That is not viable. Fortunately, our friends from CESA 15, Joel and Oskar, know the solution for this. With the help of a torrent, a switch, a router and a bunch of network cables, Wikipedia was seeded from one computer to ten at a time, and since so many computers were active in the torrent, they could help each other. Instead of six hours for one computer, it took approximately two and a half hour for ten computers! Thanks for the help Joel and Oskar!
Installing Wikipedia was the last, but not least, step of all. Last Thursday, I (Daniel) and Matilda hired a car and drove to a guy called Roy in Gothenburg. He turned out to be a very nice man who runs a pallet shop. We bought one pallet and six pallet collars. Matilda, quick-witted as always, also added a lid to the order. That might be good to have, so that the computers are well-protected. After a dramatic drive back to Chalmers with our new pallet, we also made a tram trip to an electronic shop in the city, to buy extension cords with multiple plug sockets. The guy working there was quite surprised when we asked for 50 of those, but he was very helpful and nice to us. Another thing worth mentioning was that we ate hamburgers at one of the world’s biggest hamburger restaurants (The Donk, as we call it).
One day after the pallet was bought, Hampus, Matilda and I packed all computers, chargers and extension cords with multiple plug sockets and they are now ready for shipping this week! At last, we would also like to thank the guys at LanTeam for donating 30 chargers to us, since we did not have enough.
