Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Yesterday, I held the first meeting of the Computer Club that I founded here at the college in Tema, Ghana. I didn't go into very technical things right now, to not scare anyone away, but gave an introduction to wikis and blogs, and showed the students how to use the wiki and blog I set up for the club. You can have a look at my LaTeX-created beamer slides.

I think the club went quite well. About 20 students seem to be interested, and a few more might come with the 11-graders who start school next week. There seems to be little geeky knowledge present, so I'm not sure if I can go into the more technical things of geekdom, like weird programming language, fixing bugs in Free Software etc. But we'll see, maybe I underestimate them, and one year is a long time for an interested geek to get into new stuff.

Besides one box that I can fiddle around with, and which hosts the club's wiki and blog, there is no Linux yet at the school. I did help a bit with setting up a few windows boxes, and already I'm happy to know that at least I have an alternative. Walking from computer to computer to manually deinstall software preinstalled by the vendor, manually set hostnames, manually write down MAC adresses for the WLAN MAC-filter, manually joining the domain and manually install all other software does not seem like the way I would want to administrate more than two computers. In Germany, we call that "Turnschuh-Administration" (sneaker or running shoe administration).



Unfortunately, that is not an argument to bring to make the school use more Linux, as a dual boot setup is the most I can hope fore at the moment, and that does not ease the pain of Windows administration. I'll keep you up to date on that.