If you have answered yes to either then you have the ability to make this ‘mission possible’. There are many computer recycling programs but sadly most use proprietary software because they’re provided with cheap licenses and unwanted machines. These programs are staffed by wonderful volunteers whose hearts are in the right place.

The problem is the software provided is out of date because the machines are too old to run the latest proprietary software, and of course these machines aren’t going to people who can afford to purchase software in the first place right? I don’t think that offers much of a choice for the technically challenged clients that wind up with these boxes. Do you?

The solution is simple enough, provide them with an OS that frees them from paying for software. This is where you come in if you have the time and inclination you can make a difference in your community. All I’m asking for is for you to make an effort to help spread the love you have for FOSS to people who are in need. It will make you feel good and at the same time help grow the FOSS movement.

Case in point, I took an old machine out dusted it off and installed Debian on it with LXDE and compiz, yes compiz. A 450mhz pentium III with 384 mb of ram and an nvidia mx400 (32mb) runs compiz w/ LXDE as the desktop.
While compiz itself isn’t the point, the fact is that better machines than this are being tossed aside all the time, and they need not be. So I hope this has inspired you to take some action and help out in your community.

Mirror here:
Nerdsonlinux Mirror

Original:
http://www.techd.org/crtc/

Zoiper
A new one I came across just recently, works great, very easy to configure and use.

X-Lite for Linux

Has very good voice quality, and works well, but has an odd interface, which makes it harder to configure.

Ekiga

Comes preinstalled on Ubuntu Linux, and works ok, but I’ve had problems with the G711 ulaw/alaw codec with it, voice quality seems to drop quickly with this codec.

]]> http://www.nerdsonlinux.com/2007/12/19/free-linux-sip-clients/feed/ 0 http://www.nerdsonlinux.com/2007/12/04/how-to-get-wifi-working-properly-on-the-bestbuy-hp-pavillion-dv6407nr-laptop-black-friday-special/ http://www.nerdsonlinux.com/2007/12/04/how-to-get-wifi-working-properly-on-the-bestbuy-hp-pavillion-dv6407nr-laptop-black-friday-special/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 04:58:19 +0000 hal9000 http://nerdsonlinux.com/?p=19 I bought one of these and it’s pretty sweet but it was a bit of a pain to get the wifi to work properly so I thought I’d jot down how I got it to work.I’m running Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) 64 bit version because what’s the point of having a 64 bit processor if you don’t utilize it to the fullest? Okay, so down to the specifics I used a bunch of howto’s that I’ll list as we go along.First things first my laptop came with a Broadcom Corporation BCM94311MCG wlan mini-PCI (rev 02).If this is what you have then this will probably work for you (ymmv).The restricted driver (bcm43xx) available through the Ubuntu repository did not work with my card but you can try it and see if you get better results.Not working? Keep reading…

The first thing you need to do is start from a clean slate that means removing any drivers or software you’ve used to attempt getting the card to work this includes removing ndiswrapper.Follow the instructions available at http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=297092 to get started.The dell driver does work (I tried it initially with a 32 bit install) but I decided to use the HP driver available at ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36501-37000/sp36684.exe (this driver package is for 32 bit Windows XP the 64 bit driver for Vista did not work at all for me).Substitute it if you like or not, both should work.To be safe I rebooted after adding ndiswrapper to be started on boot (sudo echo ndiswrapper >> /etc/modules) .This configuration got me insecure wifi working which is the first step in getting things sorted.

The next step for me was to get wifi working after suspend/hibernate which is actually pretty simple.You’ll need to make network-manager shut down before suspend and restart on resume.I found info on how to do that here https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/NetworkManagerunder the topic “Suspend support”.It makes sense, but for some reason it’s not implemented by default, which is a shame.Hopefully now you have working wifi with suspend/hibernate resume working.

The next step is to test WPA/WEP encryption to see if it works.Since network-manager is a pretty sophisticated set of scripts with a gui interface try to enable WEP or WPA encryption through that first.Does it work for you? If so you’re done and enjoy your new laptop.Not working yet? Okay then here’s what to do. I found that this hack works for me https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Device/Broadcom_BCM4311_rev_01_(ndiswrapper) topic Adding WPA Support (optional).Well that’s it enjoy ;-)

I was about to give up on flash websites altogether.

Check it out

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html

Firefox 2.0, Flash and Java in AMD64 Ubuntu