Crew Computers are workstations and servers that are used by various crews.

HARDWARE:

We have about 4 workstations and 4 servers, depending on how fast parts are broken/replaced.
They come in 2 basic flavours 2.5ghz p4, or 1.6Ghz p4.
The case design is a little different than the standard box with
screws in the back holding the cover on. To open these computers, you
pull the face cover off (use the hand space under the front cover and
pull the cover back, it will hinge up a bit before it comes off. With
the front cover off, you can pull the drive cartridges, and remove
drives, or you can pull the side cover off to access the interior of
the computer. Some side covers have additional screws to hold the side
cover on (it may be only the 1.6Ghz boxen).

Last year QM computer needed a sata card, and Zenn computer needed a
video card. Those computers can be identified by those added
components.

General info about the machines:

They are pentium 4.
have 3 ram slots for DDR (400mhz) ram they will accept 1g, 512m or 256m modules.

They have 3.5" floppy drives and IDE (PATA) optical drives.

The have IDE controllers and SATA controllers
They have many usb ports, but I think they are all usb1.

I think the power supplies are about 350 watts.

The motherboards are asus not sure of the model numbers.

The 2.5 boxen have a cartridge/caddy thing that holds the floppy and
hard drives, and clip into place. press the tabs in, and pull on the
cartridge to remove it, just push it in until it clicks into place to
install it. You can change the drive without pulling the cover if you
are careful.

We had 2 big drives (300gb, and 200), but those drives are acting
funny. we have a few 40G drives that seem to be fine. I think one is
maxtor, and the other two are WD.

These computers wont boot from USB, its possible that there is a
firmware update that may enable that feature, but it may also be that
they are running the most current bios, or that the most current bios
may still not support usb boot.

Software:

Last year (2013) we used ubuntu, but with unity removed. Unity slows the computers down too much, and pushes advertising.
This year we are using Lubuntu (a light weight variant of ubuntu that works better on older computers). We have setup a apt-cache (cacheberry) to help keep computers updated while minimizing network load.

There are 2 ways to install Lubuntu, We have an install CD (because these comptuers wont boot from USB), or an 11GB disk image with a full install is also updated to the first week of june 2014. The disk image is the quick fast way, but its a little trickier than an install. If you have an old system, then you can use the image to clobber the old partition, and MBR, and boot the computer and update (there may be some updates since the image was made). If you are doing a new disk, then image the partition, mbr, Then resize the partition and add an extended partition and inside that partition create a swap partition.

Once the system is up and running, you will need to change the hostname (/etc/hostname) the default will be "berry". The username should be hippie, and no password. The system should boot up as user hippie by default, and automatically login to a desktop with the 2014 poster on the desktop.

-- JamieC - 15 Jun 2014