!Linux terminal server project in south carolina
 --- 
9 June 2026
 --- 
My only experience with kids on a tty console was in
a small poor community in the South Carolina low-
country after a catastrophic flood more than ten
years ago.

Friends had a stack of retired thin clients. A small
business owner donated a circa 2004 laptop from her
storage unit. Friends had yagi antennas. We built an
8-machine computer lab in the community center/youth
center/distribution hub, originally for FEMA benefit
registration, then for kids who were out of their
destroyed schools.

The storage-unit laptop was the server in a LTSP
(Linux terminal-server project) system. Thin clients
and even older laptops were the terminals. They ran
edubuntu educational software (most of it not as
good as DOS stuff I since discovered) in an X GUI.
Each kid had their own login. Of course it worked on
any computer they sat at. Updates only needed to be
run on the server.

Internet access was over a wireless broadband link
through a yagi antenna to the home internet connect-
ion of a willing neighbor a kilometer away. Filtered
through a cacheing squid proxy, the computer lab
caused her no trouble. Her rural telephone cooperat-
ive ISP said it was halal.

One boy got really into a computer programming game
like LOGO or Scratch, learning C by commanding a
critter to run around the screen. One girl learned
to write a resume in LibreOffice because she wanted
to help her mom get a job.

But hands- down the most popular thing was when the
kids learned to ctrl-alt-F2 into a tty and use
ancient social unix tools like wall(1), talk(1), and
write(1) (all available on sdf, if you're using it)
after checking to see who(1) was online.

If they had more previous computer/tablet experience,
maybe the web access would have appealed to them
more. But instead, these "computer-illiterate" 8-
year-olds sat in a shared lab snickering as they
switched back and forth from GUI to tty to chat with
each other about who stank etc., on machines that
were previously e-waste.

Over the years, when I put little Linuxes on old
laptops for not particularly computer-literate
friends, they generally only used the web browser.
That's specifically what I'm trying to avoid now.