About the script I wrote the hardware.sh BASH script to make it a bit simpler for volunteers at The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project to figure out what hardware was in a computer. For more than a dozen years we’ve been asking volunteers to gather information from the BIOS, or using phoronix-test-suite under our PXE booted Debian Live environment. Volunteers would write the information on quarter page-sized sheets we would attach to each computer. While this was a useful function to help volunteers get to know hardware in a computer, there were a few problems with this method: ...

The Computer Recycling Project used Ubuntu Linux from 2006 to 2010 It’s a challenge to talk about Xubuntu Linux without referring to Xubuntu’s more popular relative, Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu Linux was started in 2004 and based around a then popular flavour/distribution of Linux, Debian. Debian Linux was the distribution The Working Centre’s Computer Recycling Project initially used to develop our own Linux distribution, WCLP – Working Centre Linux Project, way back in 2001. By 2006 the project had switched to Ubuntu Linux. Ubuntu Linux was a rising star back in 2006, it made installing “difficult to install” proprietary drivers easy (compared to Debian). And because Ubuntu was based on Debian, people with Debian experience could easily adapt to Ubuntu. ...

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