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from the of-course-it-is-impossible-to-get-online-using-a-desktop dept.
US Laptop Shortage Could Derail Remote Learning:
As students and teachers prepare for a return to in-person learning for at least some of the time this fall, many of the nation's schools are facing shortages and delays for laptops and tablets needed for online learning, an Associated Press investigation revealed.
Lenovo, HP and Dell, the nation's largest computer companies, have informed school districts that they are short nearly five million laptops.
[...] Last month, at the request of President Donald Trump, the U.S. Department of Commerce imposed sanctions on 11 Chinese companies, including Lenovo, AP reported. School administrators have asked the Trump administration to devise a solution because remote learning without laptops is impossible.
Lenovo has informed school districts of the supply chain delays and the trade controls set by the Commerce Department, which would cause another slowdown. Lenovo declined to respond to an inquiry from AP.
Have any Soylentils run into this?
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Sunday August 30 2020, @03:10PM (1 child)
Another place to look is at expired or expiring Chromebooks as they are offloaded at a discount. PCWorld has compiled a handy list of 77 Chromebook models about to expire [pcworld.com]. You can get them for a substantial discount and then upgrade to coreboot firmware [mrchromebox.tech] and then install the GNU/Linux distro of your choice.
The down side is that you will need some kind of external storage because the SSDs on the Chromebooks are very small and the hardware often has no physical spare room for a longer SSD with more capacity. However, that is not much of a problem for school work since most classes and schools have already arranged for online storage somewhere. It might suck but they have it for the duration of the class and somtimes a little while afterward. If you are doing something instead for the SOHO, then there are a lot of options from SFTP to Ceph to Samba to NFS depending on your situation.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Sunday August 30 2020, @07:48PM
External storage [amazon.com] of a sort is reasonably inexpensive, and usually is available on Black Friday specials as well. ChromeOS's standard Open/Save File dialogs also provide Google-Drive as a standard (if slower) source/destination.