[Edu-sig] Donated computers, Linux, and IDLE problems.

[Richard Guenther]

I'm not sure if this is the best place to post this question, but it certainly fits into the edu-sig realm ;-)

I will be sponsoring a high school computer programming club again this year.  I get older computers donated to me quite often, most in the Pentium3 range.  Often they have a crippled version of Windows on them, but no restore disks, etc.  Also, most of these computers will NOT be hooked up to the internet.

What I'd like to do is put a simpler LINUX distro on them (MepisLite is my current favorite for these situations), and then get Python up and running with IDLE working.

But it's not easy!  I don't know of a distro yet that comes with a working IDLE installed.  Whenever I've done the source file dance ("./configure, make, make install") with newer versions of Python, I get the common PYTHONHOME and PYTHONPATH problems and also can't get IDLE to work.

Any suggestions or advice?

Richard

P.S.  I know this sounds like a technical question for a n00b forum, but the context of this problem (I'm a teacher trying to set up some convenient Python boxes for my students to use) made me think it might be appropriate here.  If not, I apologize in advance.  I am, btw, getting our PCs in the computer lab set up with Python (and IDLE) running on Windows, I just wanted to put these donated comps to good use....





       
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