The Computerized Classroom
At this point, the lab has to serve as part of a multifunction classroom, and a rather small one. To this end, a table has been installed behind each of the three folding doors that access a large storage closet in one wall. Open the doors and you have three workstations. Close the doors, and you have a regular classroom. Pretty neat.

The workstations are IBM Celeron 500s that were generously donated by a local law firm. They have 192 megs of RAM installed, a modest integrated video chipset on the motherboard, and optical drives salvaged from other machines.



Not particularly powerful hardware, to be sure, but if you can put the right operating system on them, they perform rather well. The operating system of choice, naturally, is Linux. More specifically, it is a Slackware/Linux Live respin out of Norway called Wolvix, which can be found at  http://wolvix.org. Much like the rest of Wolvix, the Xfce environment that Wolvix uses by default provides a lovely balance between being light on system resources and still being user-friendly and attractive. Wolvix is a tightly executed live distro with a high degree of multimedia functionality built in and an excellent installation utility, so it can be run from either the optical drive, installed to the hard drive as a CD image, or installed much like a regular Slackware install, or installed to run from a USB pen drive, all with little more than a click of a mouse button. This is by far my favorite lightweight Linux distribution.

Please note that in the photos, the workstations are displaying a KDE login screen rather than the default Xfce/Wolvix login screen as seen on the laptops. This was an experiment on my part that didn't work out very well (KDE is a bit heavy for these machines) and they will be reverting to the Xfce/Wolvix login shortly.

The laptops were the result of another donation that came in via the National Cristina Foundation, http://www.cristina.org , which is another outlet for old computer hardware if you need one (please think of us first, though  :-)  They are fairly modern machines, two Dell P4s and an HP Athlon 900mHz, which are configured to dual boot either into XP or Wolvix so they can be used in the lab when needed and used as general-purpose XP machines the rest of the time. This gives us the capability to teach up to six people at a time in the lab using a common OS and desktop environment. The three desktop workstations will remain up and running for use by consumers as needed during the day, but as space is so limited, any expansion for instructional purposes would require flat-panel displays at a minimum or preferably the assembly of a "classroom in a cart" - type arrangement using laptops that can be set up and torn down as needed. So, if you know of someplace that has a stack of Pentium II-class (or better) laptops that they need to find a home for.

All the machines connect out to the Internet via a wired LAN running to a business DSL connection.

We are in the process of developing a curriculum specific to the needs of persons recovering from mental illness and have an experienced keyboarding and computer applications teacher lined up to run the classes, which should begin sometime in May or June. Topics to be covered will include basic PC operation, basic Internet use, basic office applications (using OpenOffice)...you know, all the basics. :-) Lots of these folks were teens and young adults when stricken with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, major depression. etc. and have spent years or even decades largely out of circulation. Now, with improved treatments, many of them are reemerging to live normal lives and reenter the workforce, which is hard to do when your computer skills date from the mid-'90s, when no one had heard of Monica Lewinski and the browser of choice was still Mosaic... But, we aim to fix some of that.

But wait, there's more!

We are also in the process of preparing several machines to be distributed out to individuals that have completed our mentoring training program. These have been 200-300mHz-class machines also running Wolvix. They are not speed demons, but they DO work pretty well for most common office-type applications and accessing the web. The first such machine was delivered to a mentor located in Charleston a few weeks ago, and several more are in preparation. Many of these machines were very generously donated by the good folks at SMI/Owens Steel, one of whose former machines is also in the closet acting as a file server for the lab.

So, what do we need at present?

We can still use just about anything, really. Of particular interest would be laptops (PII/K6-2 class or better) and flat-panel monitors of most any size or vintage, as they could be used to expand the lab without impacting the usability of the space for other applications. Any PC that is PII/K6-2 class or better would be usable. Newer machines would, of course, be preferable. 10/100 switches and other network gear would be nice as well. Oh, and I am running short on CRT monitors for the machines going out to the mentors. PC66, PC100 and PC133 RAM or anything newer would help a lot. Really, just about anything. I have pretty much deployed all the old stuff I had stuck back. Now it is time to clean out your closets. :-)

Thanks so much for your prior support. Things are moving along pretty nicely, thanks to y'all.

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