Penguinised the older BHPC Jam-Filled Babbage Engine, with a view to reducing our single points of failure for the Worlds.
I'm not sure of the exact vintage, but it's an indestructible Toshiba Tecra that sports:
a) An optical drive
2) A serial port
iii) A trackpad with proper buttons that doesn't think it's cleverer than you and still works when prodded by sweaty cyclists
four) A "Designed for Windows XP" sticker
Suffice to say, successive Windows 10 updates had got it to the point where it was basically unusuable. Further investigation revealed a Core2Duo something or other, 4GB of RAM, and a very non-original-looking battery and SSD.
Anyway, after burning an install CD[1], it's running Debian with LXDE surprisingly well, and just needs a bit of python-wrangling[2] to sort out an environment that'll run the timing software[3]. Not surprisingly both the on-board WiFi and wired Ethernet work fine under Linux. The wired wasn't supported at all by Windows 10, and the ancient WiFi driver worked, but couldn't handle WPA2 encryption. We'd previously relied on stuffing its USB ports with dongles in order to connect it to the Internet and/or the Box Of Winky Lights™, which is presumably why some joker has stuck an Apple sticker on its lid.
Real Excel hopefully won't be needed. I've installed LibreOffice in case manual wrangling of sign-on sheets is necessary.
Hopefully it won't get used for anything more intensive that displaying the Javascript version of the race clock at Race Control.
[1] Couldn't persuade it to boot from a USB drive, and I have a stack of blanks right here.
[2] Steve Irwin style
[3] Minus the finish line video capture stuff, which is a RAM hog and potentially very storage intensive.
