[CLUG-chat] Prison Linux Users

[Jonathan Carter]

Chandre de Wet wrote:
> If anyone is interested in making contact... You can get their contact 
> details from me off-list. From what I understand it's a couple of guys, 
> and they were resorting to go back to windows, but hopefully they're 
> encouraged again after our chat.

Just a bit of background...

One of the prisoners at Malmesbury Prison got hold of Ubuntu Linux and 
installed it. He's with a bunch of other prisoners who are studying 
"I.T." at the moment, and they are all very excited about Linux. They 
have lots of time to play around, but like Chandre said, they are not 
allowed to have Internet or E-Mail access, for obvious reasons.

I spoke to the head of education at the prison, and he said he'll allow 
incoming and outgoing calls, it just needs to go through him. We are 
also allowed to fax information through to them, as long as he checks it.

This is very premature, but we (Shuttleworth Foundation) might be 
installing some tuxlab-like labs into some prisons. Malmesbury prison 
already has 8 computers, but they're not networked and don't allow for 
much playing around (especially with stuff like email server, etc).

I'm going to visit the prison next month, and I'm thinking to negotiate 
that we can set up a list that the education head can moderate, so that 
they can at least get some feeling of a linux community.

If we do install a system, it will most likely be a 10 PC thin client 
system, and they'll be able to keep their existing 8 PC's and turn them 
into their own "play" servers. Although, like I said, this is very 
premature and I'll only have more details near the 25th of June.

Will keep you updated... perhaps through a wiki page of the project :)

-Jonathan