October 27, 2009

We attempted to wipe all the computers clean and install Ubuntu to them.  With some of them, they worked fine, though we usually had to change the jumper settings to remove the BIOS password.  This is as far as we got:

(Please do not update this table. It is a progress report, not our official inventory of equipment.)

Computer Name	Processor	Wiped?	OS Installed	Comments
1. Solomon	Intel Celeron	Yes	None	This computer uses SATA HDD. DBAN ran extremely slow - took 17 hours, 23 minutes to complete.
2. Joshua	Intel Pentium 4	No	None	Adam knows the problem.
3. Samuel	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs.
4. Elijah	Intel Pentium 4	No	None	can't boot from CD. HDD is working fine, might be something wrong with the CD drive
5. Elisha	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs.
6. Ruth	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs. Sometimes, it has trouble finding the CD ROM drive.
7. Daniel	Intel Pentium 4	No	None	Freezed when wiping. Now seems working fine, needs more than one hour and a half to finish.
8. Amos	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs.
9. Ezekiel	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs.
10. Nathan	Intel Pentium 4	Yes	Ubuntu	Needs updates & programs.

All Intel Pentium 4 processors should be 1.5Ghz, while the Celron is running on a 2.8GHz Celeron processor.

Solomon uses a SATA hard drive, which means that if that drive turns out to be bad, it will not be very easy to find a replacement.

Adam Kehoe apparently knows what’s going on with Joshua, but we haven’t heard back from him what that is, or if it was resolved.

Elijah won’t boot from CD. I cannot seem to bring up the boot order menu, either. I’m not quite sure how to diagnose this problem yet.

Daniel froze twice while we were trying to wipe the hard drive. It’s currently going on a third attempt, which we hope will not take too long to finish. The last time we tried wiping it, it made it 25.61% of the way through the first pass. That might have sufficed if it were the original hard drive that came with it, but I believe we swapped it out for a different one. So, it might be okay, but it might not be. It also worries me that it keeps freezing. We may want to consider checking this drive for errors.

Finally, we were unable to install updates to any computer due to lack of connectivity, probably because badger is down. Given that we aren’t sure how to get it up and running (and did not try to boot it, either), we decided to stop with the clean installs of Ubuntu. We now have 6 OS-ready computers and 4 troublemakers.

October 30, 2009

We finally got our machines hooked up to the internet. There are still a couple of troublemaker computers that need to be addressed. Otherwise, we have computers that are set up with the updated Karmic Koala (Ubuntu 9.10) and software packages installed. The next step from here seems to be to troubleshoot the last one or two computers, then get everything set up with educational & productivity software.

After the end of the day, the overall project status is:
Solomon is now connecting to the internet, though it seems that it’s very picky in terms of the ethernet cable that’s being used. I’m not sure, but I would guess that there may be a batch of faulty cables. I have set those aside for evaluation.

#2) Joshua now works, for some mysterious reason. I flashed the bios password, wiped the hard drive with dban and installed Karmic Koala.

At this point, all computers have had their security updates loaded, and the following pieces of software installed: Adobe Flash Player, Edubuntu Educational Suite, Pingus (Game).

Solomon and Samuel are both loaded with Stellarium, an astronomy program. It might be helpful to include a manual for this software in the documentation, though I would believe that any student just playing and exploring it should be able to figure things out without too much effort. However, a quick guide should help. On Samuel (Pentium 4 machine), it runs very slow. I will try it again to see if it’s just lag form the initial installation, but I’m probably going to uninstall it.

Daniel is a problem child. We were unable to identify the problem, so we have decided to scrap that in favor of a different machine, which needs everything done to it. This includes dban, ubuntu installation, updates and software installation (Edubuntu, flash, Pingus). The new computer is named Jeremiah. At present, Jeremiah does not power on. We will look into what is causing this problem.

We need to evaluate audio/visual software to use on the high-powered machine, Solomon. Given that I have almost zero knowledge in this field, this will take some research.

October 31 – December 3

At this point, our largest problem was dealing with Daniel and its replacement, Jeremiah. We replaced Daniel with the new computer, which would not power on for whatever reason. We attempted reseating cables, removing IDE devices that might be causing problems. No solution seemed to be working for this one, so I located another computer in the cabinet. After struggling with that one, it appears to work, complete with the updated ubuntu, and all the software packages included. This computer may be less reliable than desirable, however.

December 4-5: East St. Louis visit #2

Upon arriving at our site, we first worked to arrange the computers to effectively utilize the power outlets in the room. We managed to get computers set up alongside all four walls, all of them connected to power strips with surge suppressors. Our next challenge was to make best use of our limited RJ-45 cable supplies. After getting everything set up, we discovered that we lacked cables of sufficient length – we needed to create an additional seven cables to reach the workstations located across the room from the switch. Additionally, we needed to run one cable from the computer lab into the administrator’s office, so the computers in the lab could be connected to the printer.

Without a DHCP server, we were forced to manually assign IP address to each computer. In order to make diagnostics easier, we went with the following settings:

IP: 192.168.1.<computer number> – For example, Solomon was #1. Solomon’s IP address became 192.168.1.1
Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
Gateway: 255.0.0.0

Additionally, we made sure that each computer was connected to the corresponding numbered port on the switch, so we could easily detect which connections were not working. After everything was set up, we determined that one of our cables was faulty, and that we lacked the supplies to replace or recrimp that cable. As a result, one of the computers is not connected to the network. At present, this does not come with too serious of a consequence. Our site is not connected to an ISP for internet connection, and the computers are presently unable to print to the office printer. They may need an additional driver for that printer, a Dell 3000CN. Without this, the computers were printing pages of garbled text. At present, we have disabled the ability to print on the lab computers. In the interim, all of the computers are capable of using USB flash drives, and they can print from the office computer. Obviously, this is a problem that will need to be corrected in the future.