Newbie- Installing an Edubuntu lab :)

[Vernon Graner]

Tim:

Thanks for the lighting quick response! :) I'll answer inline here:

Timothy Hart said:
> Glad to see you jumping on the bandwagon. Have you thought of going to
> a thin client solution? Meaning using the K6-500 machines as thin
> clients. If you have a beafy server you will get better performance.

No beefy server (I wish!) "the lab was updated *only* 5 years ago!"
(these are the words of the administration here at the school) and at
that time they didn't see the need to replace the big white server box,
so they left a Dual Pentium Pro 200mhz box, 128m RAM with 2x 4g SCSI
drives in a software raid (mirror) running Windows NT4! Arg... :P

> Either way, you will definatley be better off with Edubuntu than Win98.

I have my hopes set on that... :) I'm already setup on about 3 machines
and burning more install disks while I type this... from a windows
machine.. but not for long! ;)

>> 1) Internet supervision? (i.e. netnanny type app)
> Don't you have anything at the server level already?

Nope, they didn't have anything setup at all.. they gave us a "deer in
the headlights" stare when we asked about it. Said "Well, we don't let
them go to bad places so they don't..." Hmmm. :)

I then checked some of the browser caches and found that they are indeed
going places that have "no redeeming social or educational value". :) So,
I need to find something to limit the scope of the things they can do
inadvertently or "vertently". :)

>> 2) Drive imaging (i.e. if a machine gets destroyed by a student)
> Again a thin client environment would be best here. Only the server
> would have things on it. Although, the Eduntu install doesn't take
> much time if something goes wrong. A regular user can't really do much
> damage. Just don't give admin rights to normal users.

Cool. I'll try to sell them on the idea of a thin client setup (I've had
some experience both with RDP windows systems as well as wyse winterms
and Citrix metframe setups, so the concept is appealing). They have 100mb
switching  in place already, so bandwidth to a server shouldn't be at
issue, but the dinosaur server would have to go... :(

In the meantime, there's a poster on the wall of the computer lab that
quotes Theodore Roosevelt:

"Do what you can,
with what you have,
where you are."

I think it is meant as a hint... :)

>> 3) Print management (CUPS? or is there some "quota" system where we can
>> give students "X" sheets of printing)
> Yes, but I would recommend doing a server based print system.

Is there an in-place solution bundled that I could just activate? I
haven't done much other than point the workstation to the IP of the
printer and setup a postscript driver in the past.

>> 4) Grade book/teacher resources
> Do you use anything now?

All windows based proprietary stuff. I'd like to get the teachers excited
about new things as the gradebook program they are using is an old Win 3x
app that isn't very stable and the vendor no longer supports. I think
they would jump at the chance to move to something new.

>> The lab is supposed to be available for children between 2 and 10yr
>> olds so we need lots of varied apps.
> Like what? There are so many with the default install and thousands
> more at your finger tips with Synaptic.

In truth, I haven't explored the suite of apps bundled in Edubuntu too
deeply, so I was wondering if there are any "must haves" that I should
seek out right away and make part of the default install.

Also, we do have quite a few of the older "reader rabbit" and "clifford
the dog" apps on CDROM. Would these be possible to run using WINE? I
didn't even check to see if wine is in the edubuntu bundle. I sorta just
decided that I would "sink or swim" with this and just jumped right in.
:)

Thanks again for your quick response! :)

Vern

-- 
Vern Graner CNE/CNA/SSE    | "If the network is down, then you're
Senior Systems Engineer    | obviously incompetent so why are we
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Austin Office 512 328-8947 | you, so why are we paying you?" ©VLG