problems with graphics cards

[R. Scott Belford]

David Van Assche wrote:
> I've been running 7.10 Gutsy on 60 computers with a powerful 64 bit 
> server running on 6 Gigs of Ram (surprisingly little RAM is used) for a 
> good 3 months now. I've read the reports of 7.10 being a failure and I 
> have to disagree on most accounts. If you don't modify too much and you 
> know what you are doing, things work wonderfully,

I've read a few of the comments about how it works fine and you must be 
a ween if it doesn't work for you.  I'll make sure to pass this feedback 
on to the non-technical teachers in need of affordable technology and a 
helpful community that understands their skill and time limits.

Just out of curiousity, David, how would the average teacher, you know, 
the ones that we want to adopt Edubuntu but have fewer than a few hours 
each week to admin, how would they have handled this issue

> This is very cool, definetly useful for any real world scenario. Its a
> constant daily task to kill processes and/or show teachers and
> students how to do this themselves... Its very common for firefox not
> to start due to the 'you are already running another session of
> firefox' message. This will seriously reduce administration times...
> good work... just one question... will it work on Gutsy ?

This was your own statement.  Until I found watchdog and installed it 
for one of the teachers I help, his lab was failing as the day 
progressed.  This was quite a modification that required you to know 
what you are doing.

and this

> I've just noticed sound is not working on my clients... It was working fine under feisty.... what can I do to get it back?

The average teacher who upgrades from 7.04 to 7.10 will be able to 
budget how much time to researching and solving this while wondering why 
they have *more* work after upgrading?

and this

 > https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ThinClientHowtoNAT

You, like myself and others, have been pointing people to a wiki that 
doesn't work after reboot.


and this

> I'm assuming something must have changed in Gutsy as to how users are
> detected, but its a shame because my teachers started using this a lot
> and were praising it to high heaven. Now we're a bit stuck using tcm,
> which leaves a lot to be desired.
> 
> Any help to get it to work would be much appreciated.

You, like many, really enjoyed the functionality of TCM and Teachertool. 
  Now TCM doesn't work with Gutsy, and you have to hack away at TT.

The words that stand out to me are "my teachers" which suggests that you 
are support, you are not the average teacher surviving without David 
there to support her.  You actually do know what you are doing, and the 
school is blessed to have you around.  If Edubuntu is going to be Linux 
for Human Beings (who know what they are doing), then we should ignore 
me as flamebait and go about patting ourselves on the backs for doing a 
great job.  Meanwhile, on the Edubuntu developers mailing list, some guy 
from Augusta has stumbled on the site and asked a question to the wrong 
forum about installation issues.  I wonder what the ripple effect of 
Edubuntu adoption will be for his social network when he has to escalate 
his skillset to even become a user.

This is by no means to challenge you, at all, David.  I just wanted to 
use your experiences to observe that we, as early adopters who know what 
we are doing, are not the teachers who need this software.  Some 
teachers don't even know they need it, and they certainly wouldn't be 
able to come to a list like this and know how to ask for help much less 
how to implement it.

--scott

>    Sadly, the only solution I see is making special chroots for all the 
> exceptions to the rule (auto-detection of the graphics card details)

let's hope that no teacher ever has to do that. :-)