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It turns out that CRT monitors are still useful

I stayed at a B&B two weekends ago which has an ADSL Internet connection, an office PC & a WiFi-connected personal laptop (which I redid the config on so it actually connected, happily the WiFi router's password set was still admin/admin).

Next visit to the area, they’ll also have an Internet cafe workstation since they have room for a 19" CRT (old-style glass television) screen, since I have 13 of those sitting behind my house, plus a few “old” PCs including a couple of dual-core 3GHz to which I can fit a pair of 512MB DDR2 DIMMs & a random (80GB) IDE hard drive.

A selected PC is about to grow a copy of Maverick Meerkat Kubuntu & simple instructions for manually re-creating the default user (as in, Ctrl-Alt-F1, log in, “sudo su sh scriptname” to remove the home directory tree & unpack a new template from a .tar.bz2 file).

Said template will include a Flash plugin, a Video DownloadHelper plugin, a reasonable set of bookmarks, an “empty” Thunderbird config. Plus a default web page set to a local HTML file detailing basic instructions.

The install will include Firefox, Chromium, Thunderbird, OpenOffice defaulting to MS-Office file formats, ffmpeg, GIMP, Audacity, k9copy, & a few other toys.

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