Rob mock, teacher Beaverton Rural Schools email me at http://mockster.net/contact.htm

Before the macul conference, I wanted to see if  it was possible for someone like myself to install lon-capa on a home-assembled computer.

I enlisted the aid of the boilogy teacher down the hall from me, Jason Hitsman.  He's a geek.

The first thing I asked him was where to get a server for not too much money.  Everything was under $500*.  If you're a public school teacher like me, then you most likely have one or more students who would love to assemble this machine for you.  If you ask around, I bet you can find a kid who has already been building machines for people who comes highly recommended.  I stuck with Jason because, well, he's a geek.

He went to extremetech.com and found plans  for a linux server: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,1646532,00.asp
And after some price searching, ordered them from: http://www.zipzoomfly.com/

 

 

 

 

* Duh.  I know you don't have $500 lying around to use for this fun little experiment (I used some old grant money).  Anyway, if you read the hardware requirements, you'll see that the big boys, like universities, need a nice computer.  I talked to the developers of lon-capa a couple years ago, and they told me that at that time, lon-capa would run nicely on my old Pentium II machine.  It is my feeling that if you approach your tech people and administrators having already made some progress (like doing a successful install of lon-capa) on the old junker computer you or your department have lying around, they will be much more likely to help you out.