As some may know I have been providing PC's for refugees in detention centres in Australia. I typically buy PII's and the odd PIII if the price is right - each PC will have a floppy and CD Rom. The auction PC's are always stripped of all OS and software before sale and often it's a challenge to restore them to their former glory.

Where possible I buy PC's that have a Win 98 licence, and equip them with:

- An office suite, Word Processor, Spreadsheet and Presentation Package
- A graphics viewer, I use IrfanView
- Acrobat Reader
- WinZip

Foreign detainees are not allowed access to the Web, hence I am not concerned about firewalls etc. Their main use is educational and to date there has been no requirement for networking.

Typically the support staff at detention centres don't have advanced PC skills and hence Linux is not an option - I don't think.

The question is - is there other freeware available which might be of assistance for (1) educational use, or even (2) leisure use by refugees.

Their nations of origin vary but are dominated by Afghanistan, Iran, Sudan and Sri Lanka. Fr'instance I recently came across a downloadable Farsi (Iranian dialect) dictionary.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Regards, John

PS I should point out that it's beyond my current means to equip them with printers,CD-R or DVD, but I will provide the odd scanner. HDD's should be 2 - 4 Gb, so software size is typically not an issue.