I had been trying to find a home for this Pentium III PC for a long time and by a happy coincidence I found it one of the best homes - i.e. a centre for autistic children.
I bought this old PC at a give away price of RM90 from a used PC shop in Amcorp Mall some years ago and enhanced it to 512MB of RAM, 80GB hard drive and replaced the ropey CD ROM drive with a working used unit.
It came with Windows XP but I soon got rid of that and installed Linux on it.
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE FOR A CLEARER VIEW
CLICK ON IMAGES TO ENLARGE FOR A CLEARER VIEW
On Sunday 18th of January afternoon I took a friend who was in pain to Assunta Hospital and waited for about four hours until he was admitted.
It was evening and I felt like having some of those delicious curry puffs at Raju's Restaurant, so went there and by chance met the director of an autistic home whom I had not met for several years.
Raju's did not have any curry puffs that Sunday but we got chatting about computers, etc. and luckily I had my netbook in my car, so I showed the director DouDou Linux for children and invited him to come by by home to view this Pentium III PC.
He came by that evening with one of their PCs on which they were having problems opening Word documents.
I fired up the PC which runs PicarOS Diego Linux especially developed for children in Spain and let him try it out and the director said that the games and educational programs were ideal for autistic children.
The screen cap below is old. Since I captured it, I have customised PicarOS Diego further to be in English as much as possible.
He then took it away and installed it in the centre the next day and informed me that the children loved it though the teaching staff found it a bit intimidating, since it is not Windows which they are familiar with.
Anyway, I am happy that I finally found this PC a very good home for it to serve out the remainder of its useful life benefiting autistic children.
Some people told me to throw away this PC, since even children in welfare homes demand fairly new PCs running Windows 7 or 8.
Meanwhile, the director left one of the centre's PC with me and in his presence I purged it of Windows and installed Zorin OS 9 Core, a derivative of Ubuntu Linux 14.04 LTS (Long Term Support).
This baby has an 3.0GHz Intel Core2Duo processor, 2GB or RAM and a 160GB hard drive, so it has plenty of oomph!
As its CD ROM drive was having problems and unusable, I replaced it with a brand new DVD writer which works fine.
In addition to the programs which came with the Zorin OS 9 distribution from Ireland, I added additional educational programs and games from the online repositories so that it natively has more or less the same programs and games as PicarOS Diego and DouDou Linux.
Since many programs for autistic children are written to run on Windows, I downloaded some free Windows-based programs for autistic children from Mulawa.net in Australia and installed them in the Windows emulator Wine using the PlayonLinux utility. Thanks Peter Hewitt for the freeware.
I also added the native Linux gaming platform Steam.
Not to waste the ample available hard disk space which quite often is hardly used by most users, I also installed PicarOS Diego (Spain), DouDou Linux (France), Qimo for Kids (U.S.), GuadaLinex (Spain) and EduBOSS (India) in the Oracle Virtualbox virtual machine manager which lets these distributions run on separate "PCs within a PC" to maximise its facilities and this powerful dual core beast runs them no problem.
Then on Friday 23d of January evening, we took it back to the autistic centre and set it up.
A computer professional came along with us to attend to a problem on one of the centre's other Windows PCs but that is his problem, not mine.
I will need to return to the centre to help familiarise the trainers with it but I am sure that the autistic children are having fun using it by now.
And yes, that screen wallpaper is the one I took of the Boh Tea plantation whilst on an Oracle media trip to Cameron Highlands in 2002.
Meanwhile the folks at Minino have come out with a new version of PicarOS Diego which runs on first generation Pentium 4 PCs.
Whilst the folks at DouDou in France have come up with a Malay language version of their Linux distribution for children.
Now why do the French have to come up with an educational Linux in Malay when Malaysia aims to be a developed nation, with a high-income, knowledge-based economy by the year 2020?
Next there is this welfare home for disabled people on Jalan Carey which needs help with their Windows PCs. No Ganesh, I haven't forgotten.
However, they are disabled adults and have different requirements.
Cheers
Charles F. Moreira
eSoapBox Mobile
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