[FSF India] Re: Lessons from the Mexican School Experiment

[Ajith Kumar]

Vivekananda Prabhu wrote:

> Dear RMS,
>
> I am *not* promoting non-free drivers, be they Windows
> or Linux drivers.
>
> Most of these grey market vendors use non-standard
> hardware manufactured in China, Singapore, Malaysia,
> Taiwan etc. Most of these hardware come only with
> Windows drivers. On many PCs it is simply not possible
> to install & run any OS other than Windows
>

This is not true.  Currently the market is flooded with motherboards
based on intel 810 chipset
with onboard video and sound and works well with linux. The soft modems
there is a slight
problem but the motorola chipset based ones availbale here, Delhi, for
Rs.600/- works well
under 2.4 kernel, motorola provides the driver though.
A home user is mainly concerned with video, sound and the modem and they
don't seems to
be much of a problem for the machines bought now.

I find a totally different problem when asking somebody who has an old
machine, like a P1 or a cyrixII with
32 vMB RAM, to switch over from windows to linux.    The main problem is
the new distributions come
with KDE /GNOME require large amount of RAM and same with StarOffice
,the MSOffice substitute.
Linux Terminal Server Project ( www.ltsp.org) seems to be a reasonable
solution for schools.
I am able to run Netscape and Staroffice on 32MB pentium1 machines
acting as X-terminals, yes i had to replace
few sis video cards with ciruss llogic cards. The ciruss logic video
card, once very popular here,
is well supported by linux from the beginning but there are problem
cases like Sis.  We have more than hundred
PCs, from P1 to P111  including Cyrix and ADM, running linux.


ajith