This project documents my hands-on experinece to combating electronic waste by fully restoring, upgrading, and repurposing discarded or non-functioning computer hardware. For this project there are two primary objectives: to practice low-level hardware and software troubleshooting and maintenance and to demonstrate a practical approach to managing E-Waste.
The focus was on a collection of Panasonic Toughbbooks aquired through a government auction. The initial problem with the toughbooks was a lack of hardrives in each system. Luckily these laptops are modular making them convienient to replace parts on. After installing harddrives in the machines, I needed to put an operating system on the machines to run. For my personal machine I used my own custom flavor of Arch Linux, which works excellent on the tough books due to its light weight, however Arch linux does not have the right drivers for the touchpad. Because of this, I have begun writing these drivers myself, but in the meanitme I installed MX linux on the other Toughbooks. I chose this distrobutionn because of its relative ease of use for new linux users. While it works much like Ubuntu or Debian, MX Linux is the spiritual successor to Antix Linux, the antifacist distrobution. With this distrobution, I was able to ennable the touchpad and make the machine fully functional, but before I could fix the mouse, I had figure out how to unlock the bios. The bios was password protected, so I looked for default passwords on panasonic devices, and tried passwords until one finally worked. To make these machines appealing to buy I also downloaded all of wikipedia to the harddrive for offline viewing, and gave each laptop a set of useful preinstalled tools and instructions for how to use the machine.