Is there anything else I should put on a laptop I intend to donate to a school that can all be run offline?

[MuttMutt]

So a little more information here. In January I will be in Belize and hope to be diving through a place in Belize City that accepts things for the local schools. Initially I was going to pick up some paper and what not then remembered I had an older HP laptop (dv6700 AMD version 4GB ram 300GB HDD) and started hunting for an OS that would work with it. Settled on Q4OS with the Trinity desktop environment. Installed a bunch of stuff on there from Flathub like Stellarium and did my best to grab all the Sugar learning apps along with a couple games that were educational and a few for just fun. Not knowing if internet would be available at the location where the laptop will be I made sure to pack it full of everything I could think of and also installed Kiwix. For Kiwix I preloaded the available Wikipedia database (110GB), Wiktionary, Gutenburg Library, and Crash Course. And yes there is openoffice and a few other things like that installed as well.

Anyway after the OS install and everything else I have about 40GB left and figured I may as well see if there is anything else that would fit and be helpful. Honestly I have no clue where it will end up but wanted to do my best to load it up so that it will be useful even if it ends up in a place that barely has power available.

I also figured that others may have something similarly old and slow that would be a boon for somewhere to use as a learning tool in a school that likely doesn't have internet access either. Maybe we can setup a nice list or even a script or something that can help set it up based on how much storage is available.

 

[KGIII]

I'd look at Endless OS as the OS and just leave it as it is stock. If you add your wireless and entered the password then you'll want to clear that out.

This is one of those rare times when I'd recommend that particular OS.

 

[Fanboi]

Maybe consider they'll need space for documents, pictures, and such. Assuming they have some internet, the install size may grow. But depending on the target age, you could consider a basic Python IDE, all the most popular Python libraries, and the offline help docs (PDF, EPUB, HTML all available -- a prettier option than typing help in the python shell). Python libraries are pretty small and VSCode is like a 150MB Appimage (probably smaller if it's on Snap). Pycharm, IIRC, is about 350MB (don't recall as I don't use it -- VS Code spoiler me). Then you'll need some well-documented OSS projects as example code. Depends on the age target as I said. I started programming between 10-11yo, but that was on DOS in BASIC. Still, I figure any language kids are exposed to, they can see "oh that does this" and they'll take off. I didn't have internet as a kid -- like nobody did, big businesses had 56k dialup and 123 (Lotus 123) was the spreadsheet and it was blowing people's minds -- yet I learned to code. Don't underestimate a growing brain.

 

[Egzoset]

If it's off-line and storage is limited then one might think of CDs/DVDs, but that may not prove appropriate in dusty environments, so perhaps USB thumbdrives instead. What you choose to put on depends on what grade it's for, but that should probably include the means to re-install some OSes anyway...

 

[APTI]

try not to forget to put in things like Libre Office so they have that sort of thing. Assuming it is not part of the default install. and always install VLC

 

[MuttMutt]

I had thought about using discs and whatnot to extend the capacity but then again I have no clue where this laptop may end up other than a school in Belize and from what I read a lot of older kids drop out of school. So not knowing the skills of the potential users among other things I wanted to keep things as simple as I can. Though having a way to reinstall the OS is something I can do... maybe send a couple discs with a different OS' if needed but I don't think it's going to be possible to include everything.


I know the OS had an office suite installed (can't remember exactly which one right now) so not worried about that and VLC was included as well so no issue there.

I will say this thing is SLOW though, it stutters playing a 1080p 60FPS video so I doubt there will be much going on in that aspect.

I do agree that some sort of programming language would be a good addition I can throw on though. Will at least give them something to learn with.

 

[Zev]

I second KGIII's recommendation of EndlessOS, it is specifically designed to be used in offline environments and / or environments with low internet availability and comes bundled with a lot of educational and useful resources.

Endless OS -- OS

 

[wizardfromoz]

...try not to forget to put in things like Libre Office so they have that sort of thing.

He already has OpenOffice on it, they are very similar.

 

[Fanboi]

I had thought about using discs and whatnot to extend the capacity but then again I have no clue where this laptop may end up other than a school in Belize and from what I read a lot of older kids drop out of school. So not knowing the skills of the potential users among other things I wanted to keep things as simple as I can. Though having a way to reinstall the OS is something I can do... maybe send a couple discs with a different OS' if needed but I don't think it's going to be possible to include everything.


I know the OS had an office suite installed (can't remember exactly which one right now) so not worried about that and VLC was included as well so no issue there.

I will say this thing is SLOW though, it stutters playing a 1080p 60FPS video so I doubt there will be much going on in that aspect.

I do agree that some sort of programming language would be a good addition I can throw on though. Will at least give them something to learn with.

I'm wondering if you couldn't just create an OS partition and data partition and create a custom liveCD with the programs you need preinstalled for in case of reinstallation...

...Though after reading more about EndlessOS, it looks like a pretty solid choice as a well-balanced all-rounder. Certainly simplifies things.

Whatever you decide, though, it's pretty awesome teaching the young'ns (and maybe their teachers*) PC skills on Linux!

*In high school someone donated us a bunch of PCs and we tossed the typewriters (oh yes, and the subject "Typing" change to "Compu-Typing", lol) but they put our typing teacher in charge of the 20-something machine network and she could barely turn a PC on. My mates and I often did maintenance and troubleshooting. /off-topic

 

[MuttMutt]

I'm wondering if you couldn't just create an OS partition and data partition and create a custom liveCD with the programs you need preinstalled for in case of reinstallation...

...Though after reading more about EndlessOS, it looks like a pretty solid choice as a well-balanced all-rounder. Certainly simplifies things.

Whatever you decide, though, it's pretty awesome teaching the young'ns (and maybe their teachers*) PC skills on Linux!

*In high school someone donated us a bunch of PCs and we tossed the typewriters (oh yes, and the subject "Typing" change to "Compu-Typing", lol) but they put our typing teacher in charge of the 20-something machine network and she could barely turn a PC on. My mates and I often did maintenance and troubleshooting. /off-topic

I have given older computers away multiple times. In honesty when I upgrade I end up building two. I scrimp on the CPU and stick in half the RAM while splurging a bit on the MoBo, Case and PSU. It's especially useful if you have multiple purposes and roll with a rolling upgrade cycle. I started this one with a Ryzen 1600 in an X470. Had an RX480 already from a previous cycle. Gave the old one with something a bit slower to my father when I started. When I upgraded to the Ryzen 5800X the old one went in the MoBo that my stepson is using now. By that point older RAM was getting cheap so I built him an upgrade for like 1/4 the cost.

And I seem to end up with older stuff a lot of times so I rebuild and give them to someone who needs them. There was a place in Oklahoma City that helped people fix their cars for free if they can get the parts where someone had stolen their office computers. I dropped off one of those super heavy duty warehouse touchscreen tablets I was given. They were ecstatic as they would be able to watch a video right next to a vehicle or look things up with it. I have 4 Pentium Pro CPU's sitting on a shelf and I know I came across one of the 486 intel upgrade chips that I think was the 100Mhz version. LOL, that could be a thread on it's own.

Anyway back on topic. I have thought about something similar I honestly don't know if I want that much to deal with setting up a live cd. I need to pull an iso of endless and poke around a bit. May see if I can scrounge up a drive to test it out. I tried edubuntu first and that was... bad.

I guess I can see if I have a smaller SSD sitting around and maybe just use that instead of spinning rust. I don't get many working laptops and anything else just isn't feasible.

 

[Fanboi]

I scrimp on the CPU and stick in half the RAM while splurging a bit on the MoBo, Case and PSU.

Aside from the case, you're doing it right! Many people underestimate how important a reliable PSU is, and the importance of a future-proofed board. I got my X570-A PRO in about 2019/2020 because it promised to be compatible with all AM4 and lo and behold, MSI not only released firmware updates for those weird 4000G-series chips, but they even supported booting from NVME -- something that lots of folk have issues with, and something I didn't even know was an issue until then.

Back on-topic:

I have thought about something similar I honestly don't know if I want that much to deal with setting up a live cd. I need to pull an iso of endless and poke around a bit. May see if I can scrounge up a drive to test it out. I tried edubuntu first and that was... bad.

Yeah, a liveCD is a PITA unless you're using MX Linux (or antiX) which just automagics the entire process -- but those distros aren't geared towards edu. And yes, pretty much any *buntu is pooh-ntu these days. I'm disappointed as it was a good distro in the day, but it's become a mess at OS level and I find it less user friendly than just plain vanilla Debian. There's a patch called Linux Mint, lol. You could always just poke about EndlessOS in a VM initially, then scrounge up that drive if it works. You could also use a spare USB stick and install it to that (I mean literally, not dd'ing the ISO -- I did that for a dualboot system with a mere 32GB stick for no other reason than to see if USB speeds could hold without loading a full RAMFS as done by (most) liveCDs and it turns out they can -- although I messed up as I reinstalled GRUB on my hdd, giving the OS on flashdrive as my primary, lol, but it's an option if you can't find an old SSD/HDD).

 

[MuttMutt]

I should say I splurge more on the PSU but I hate small cases so end up spending a little bit more but usually just a plain steel box case with lots of space. Seen too many of the SFF computers kill drives and such. I often just leave the side off of the case for my desktop anyway. Eventually when I am done with my house the area I intend to use as an office will have a LARGE desk and I am thinking about building in the computers while leaving space for new stuff. Then I can retro game on old hardware but still have something more modern available.

As far as using USB drives I have done that for a while. Somewhere I have either Mint or Ubuntu floating around on a 16GB drive. Used to use that when working on windows systems that had passwords on it and such. Was hilarious when someone would drop something off with no password included and they would wonder why the password was gone from the system as they didn't remember giving it to me. Started doing that because I was tired of trying to chase someone down.

I will say that I can't stand the Ubuntu Unity interface. I don't care for the Gnome or Mac style or the new windows style stuff either. IMHO the XP look was good and the Win 7 took that a step further in some ways that was mostly good. I am using Ubuntu Mint at this point and it's been doing well and things are where they should be. One of the reasons why I made a switch from windows was due to everything getting burried deeper and deeper into the UI, I remember when the 3 click rule was the way to do things. Now it's typing and more clicks which doesn't help when you are trying to look for a tool you haven't used in months and usually only use a couple times a year. But look at all the useless pretties...

I know I have a 512GB 850 Evo in a laptop I could pull to use as well. Would speed things up for sure but then I am parting out my deceased wife's computer... I just don't have the extra available funding to buy something but at the same time I want to put together a system that will last for as long as possible.