How about members donating old equipment? this may mean getting not so modern equipment but at least it will cost nothing and be no great loss if damaged.
For the presentation rig purpose, we wanted to buy some specific stuff - build a rack to house 3 machines, put in a KVM, etc. "Most people" who do presentations have enough hardware; we wanted something we could lend out to other people. It was more a "this would be cool to have" than "we need this". Please feel free to suggest something else. We have goals in education and community support; we think that these grants are worth pursuing. Little is lost if we don't get them.
The wiki has lots of useful information, but in saying that it is very generic and does not really cover any specific distro and since each one is different it does get very confusing.
^^^ Everyone who wonders why we are only prepared ||| to support Fedora or Debian, please read that again. Remember also that Linux is Linux is Linux...
How about just remembering to mention a specific distro the information has been tested with.
"We" do this in general (all the metanet pages for example say "this bit is for Debian, this for Red Hat" - so do the Cyrus/LDAP ones to name a couple); the wiki is edited by a great number of people, and not everyone who contributes is from the WLUG itself.
How about some more HowTos on the wiki, and not just generic but distro specific.
How about you write them, then. To my mind, there are a great number, especially locally written ones. I love using my FreeSwan to Cisco PIX howto as a great example. It's there because I needed to do it. I don't need to install a dial up modem. The people that -do- need to write the howtos. We'll edit them and clean them up! Otherwise, duplicating of effort is silly - if there is a good howto on TLDP.org or something, we may as well just link to it. Craig