[CoLoCo] Linux deployment at Free Horizon Montessori

[Jeffrey LePage]

Greetings:

First: Did everyone see the story about BestBuy selling Ubuntu?  Get it now for the low low price of $19.99.

Second: Thanks to David Willson for the Samba links and advice.

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Now, An update on my continuing quest to convert my son's school to Open Source:

I'm picking up 19 new computers today, all of which will receive hardy heron.  As some of you may recall from my earlier posts, the big vendors (Dell, Lenovo, HP) insisted on installing Windows.  They were also charging way too much.  We went with a local white box assembler and saved on the shipping and the MS tax.  This vendor also went to the trouble of installing Ubuntu on one of the machines, and we verified that everything works (including accelerated graphics).

We're probably going to order 9 Asus Eee PC's today.  Does anyone know where I can get a good deal on these?  We're probably going to get them from MicroCenter here in Denver: $299.99 per unit, no shipping costs.  Everyone seems to be running out of these systems; we'll probably end up with the lime green version. ugh.

We're getting rid of our very flaky Windows domain controller.  I've decided on setting up a Samba 3 server as an NT domain controller.  BDC to come later.  This will allow easy access to network storage, unified login/authentication, easier user management, etc. for both the new Linux clients AND legacy windoze boxen.  I'm hoping to eventually figure out how to include Mac OS X clients in this scheme. 

One problem - The Asus Eee PC's are designed to run as single user machines.  I need some way of allowing people to login as the default Eee user, and then browse to their own private samba user shares without breaking the security.   Question: is there some samba browser that can authenticate and then automatically unmount the share at logout and/or after some time period?  The Eee runs Xandros Linux, which I'm informed is derivative of Ubuntu.

We also have some very elderly laptops that I'm refurbishing.  I've gotten some good performance improvements by 1) switching from xfce to openbox, 2) tuning swappiness down, and 3) setting noatime in fstab.  Any other suggestions? 

 



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