Erik Moeller wrote:
Can these machines be refurbished to turn them into Wikireader terminals?
It is theoretically possible, yes. The cases themselves are quite nice. If the computers can be used for something extremely lightweight like that, this would be perfectly fine.
Do we have any plans to do so?
We have no current plans. These machines are simply sitting in my office waiting for a plan.
I should add that I'm extremely busy and my own judgment of how I ought to most wisely spend my time would suggest that me working very much on creating 12 crappy computers to donate to a charity would not be effective; I can do a lot more good working on big picture stuff.
There are a few but not many local wikipedians who might take an interest. (To understand how few, though, note that we tried to have a local meetup of the type that I always have in Europe, and only 1 person beside me signed up to attend.)
At least some of these machines could fairly easily be turned into real servers for us, with a motherboard upgrade and so on. But even that will be a drain on my time (or someone's time), and so the cost savings would have to be fairly substantial for it to make sense for us to do that.
--Jimbo