Group:Manchester/Projects/Arcspace

Arcspace

Arcspace Manchester is a virtual and physical launch pad for creative and ethical exchange, run by local community artists and academics. It is based in Hulme, where universities, creative industries, diverse communities and organisations meet.

Manchester Free Software have set up a cluster of five computers for Internet access and tutorials.

Rationale for MFS's involvement

Arcspace are aware of and interested in 'Open Source'. We believe they are receptive to free software and its philosophy. Arcspace will be running workshops, a computer hub and recycling computers for people to take home. These are excellent opportunities for MFS to "Increase awareness and promote the use of free software within Manchester." as stated by our Mission Statement.

The Computers

The five computers were donated by Salford Uni. The some of the monitors are from the Marbella/Basement collection. They are all Pentium 4s, with at least 512 MB RAM and running Ubuntu 8.10. One of them was being used as a server and potentially has RAID capability. They have a mix of CD and DVD drives/burners. There are plenty of spare CD drives and HDDs. All are using external gfx cards, rather than any onboard ones.

The computers have been setup to log in automatically with an unprivileged guest user (password is 'whatever'). User's can make changes and save things locally, but they will be deleted on log out with the following lines added to /etc/gdm/PostSession/Default:

rm -rf /home/guest/*
rm -rf /home/guest/.*
cp -a /etc/skel/* /home/guest/
chown -R guest: /home/guest

Known Issues

The Internet access is provided by the St Wilfrid's centre. I know nothing further about the connection. Currently google.co.uk and en.wikipedia.org are returning 404 errors, I'm waiting to hear back from Vicky who has contacted someone at the centre.

The gdm script above is untested and may produce side-effects.

The screensaver will kick in after a period of inactivity and lock the screen - this should be disabled for the guest user as people won't know the password.