We offer zero-cost computers, slightly older but still quite useful, to people with particular needs — individuals who cannot afford a new computer, shelters, schools.
The computers run free/open-source software: an up-to-date operating systems and a vast array of state-of-the-art applications, and they are ready to be plugged into a network. Here is a description of the most common desktop software we provide, and here are links about free/open-source software and the GNU/Linux operating system
Please send email to freecycle-linux (at) galassi.org if you are in the Santa Fe area and would be interested in one of these computers.
This is also a great opportunity to teach people the basics of being a computer technician, both in hardware and in software. If anyone is interested in learning how to do a quick and easy hardware and software refurbishing of their computer, or of one of the freecycled computers we have, you should contact us.
A while ago I was walking down the street in my neighborhood and I saw an old Apple Power Mac G3 computer on the sidewalk — a family was moving away and had discarded it.
I took it home, hooked it up to a monitor, and found that it worked well but was very slow and only had the bare applications of Macintosh's OS/X on it. I installed a GNU/Linux distribution on it and it immediately became a very useful computer.
A while later a neighbor told me he was sick of his old Intel-based PC. He had put Windows XP on it and it was straining. He had bought himself another computer, but I took his old one and put GNU/Linux on it and gave it to his son who finds it very useful because of the large number of free software games which are in Debian-based distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system.
A friend had recently pointed me to the freecycle mailing list, and I grabbed a couple of computers that people were discarding. They turned out to be very useful once they were "software refurbished", and I have since been giving them away to needy people and organizations.
The most evolved effort of this sort is probably Portland, Oregon's Free Geek effort. They have put together an introductory video which you can download as an mpeg file or watch on YouTube.
Our plan is different in several ways: we are small (right now it's just me and some occasional help), we do not require people to come and volunteer and we do not have our own facility, but the basic idea is the same.