Free Space Manchester

This footage was taken in Manchester City Centre as part of the Futuresonic 09 festival.

We pulled it off! We had a great day with loads of visitors from the local community and huge quantity of events and workshops and activities going on for people of all ages

General info

arcspace logo

This cluster is based in Hulme, where universities, creative industries, diverse communities and organisations meet. The unique, well-located physical space will challenge societal fragmentation. Diverse individuals can re-locate themselves by interacting through workshops, training, trading and events.Arcspace also exists to unify distant, virtual communities. It utilises free, open source software, a community-led local search engine/ directory (TGL.TV) and re-cycled computers. Progressively, social networking, education and ethical trading will take then place between other local and global clusters.

Free Space Manchester has been offered a space for a computer cluster in a church in Hulme.

If you want to get involved to help provide community computer access then email us on ….

There are now 5 pc clients running the same system as the basement at the Zion Centre in Humle – (in fact they are using the old basement LTSP server)

It’s a kick ass system. You just set up the the clients to boot from the network, and if they are on the same network as the LTSP server they connect to it and “just work”.  Normally they will  present a log in screen – or you can override that so that it automatically logs in.

At the Zion, we didn’t have time to sort out the new machines so they boot into a guest account, so only 3 machines (the grey ones) will work automatically and connect to the internet.

The LTSP project is clearly the way forward for recycling crap computers into something useful – http://www.ltsp.org/ – We are lucky to have inherited

This suite can be a great training tool to help people set them up when appropriate.

However at the moment the Internet connection seems very flakey and needs more investigation.

There are some issues about using the Basement’s computer property, but let’s just see what use this suite gets, experiment, try it out and see what happens.

There are also other issues about running this kind of set up. Who gets root passwords, how decisions on what software etc get put on there etc. In many ways these are different decisions about how the space is run. It all seems a bit up in the air in the moment regarding the space by many accounts. Maybe let’s just try to do something positive there!

It would be good to know if the pcs still have internet access, maybe someone from the zion can pop along and try them out. (the grey ones)

I’ll post a bit of video documentation people soon.

Email me your wordpress username and i’ll add you so you can post to this blog