Environment and Why Linux

Minimize the Energy consumption & the world's resources

A typical desktop computer takes to produce*:

five hundred pounds of fossil fuels, 

fifty pounds of chemicals,

more than a 1500 liter of water to produce. 

Computers are very energy  consuming - also in daily use- (and lead to paper consumption). Helping low-tech rural people to get information through computer-access also increase the energy use. However it is not in our right to keep people ignorant from information to keep the energy use low. So when we deliver computers it is in our responsibility to minimize the energy use. Internal in computers they use a 12 voltage energy supply, which also sun-batteries deliver. What we can do when we renovate the computers are to give the option from outside a power socket of 12 voltage – making sun power an option. Actually it is possible to give each component its own socket (processor+fan+motherboard and each hard disk, each CD/DVD drive, floppy disk etc) which further minimize the energy use.

The Life-Length of computers:

The most important from an environmental point of view is to increase the life-length of each computer with 6-10 years depending of the users demands. That reduce the production use of heavy metals, brominated flame retardants, chloride plastic and the production-energy.

Our limit for reuse is computers with a graphic desktop environment. That is computers newer than 1988 in general (minimum 350MHz processors, 2Gb hard disk and 256Mb ram with possible Internet access). Actually, if the users accept the not modern speed, these computers can continuously be used in maybe 15 years and more with a graphic desktop for simple office purposes.

The MS-Window$XP Operative System (OS) do not support backward-compatibility so new programs are useless for computers older than 5 years current.
Using Linux OS with a limited graphic interface will give access so 1988 will continuously be the limit, although the most memory-consuming programs as video or Cat-Cam 3D programs is practically unusable in 1988 computers also. But for an average office- and Internet-users they will work acceptable. For file-server access even older computers are efficient, but they demand skills of the system-administrator.

Even the security will still be serviced by most Linus OS distributions, which lead to:

Minimizing the water-consumption

Why use Linux?

Linux Operative System (OS) is a head in front of our competitor(s) because:

1.Linux is a Society organized community that helps people to be

self-reliant. Only support without involvement is normally commercial.

2.Linux OS is a very secure system: You do not in general work as

administrator on your system, no or few viruses exist, easy firewall

system and fast updates secure against hackers. Other OpenSource partners

like Apache guarantee secure servers too.

3.Even PC-equipment that is outdated for the resource-consuming

competitors OS still work very efficient with Linux.

4.New Linux programs and backward convertible programms are constantly

developed (for also old PCs).

5.Very easy to maintain the software (basically 2 command-lines to update

ALL software).

6.As OS and most software of the Linux OS will remain open source and free

for ever (According to the GNU GPL license:

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#translations).

7.The whole OpenSource society is very widespread – mostly on servers (70%

of market share), but is increasingly going to desktop also (Linux OS from

0.1% - 3.5% in 5 years. Data per 1. of october 2005)

-- And if you like to get further with your computer? :::

8.You continue to learn more how your computer works with the Linux OS due

to error codes you can copy and search for on the Internet - compared to

unexplainable collapse of the competitors errors.

9.The open source code of Linux guarantee a continuous development and you

can legally manipulate everything yourself (and distribute it as a new

distribution ;-).

10.Not only International English but the Linux society work on making

support really international for “all languages”.*

11.You can precipitate in development of low to high level applications

and translations – which often result in well-paid jobs.