On Mon, 2007-07-30 at 18:22 -0500, Robert Citek wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> For those of you who weren't in the Shop on Saturday, Sean has departed
> for graduate school and Theresa said she's taking time off and won't be
> in during the month of August.
But I will be on email, or can be reached by phone. Just that you will
not be able to bask in the glow of my presence for the next few
weeks :-) I'm taking a sabbatical, which I hope will turn into a
Mondical, or maybe even a Tuesdical.
> That's great for both of them, but
> leaves us with an enormous gap. Is there anyone that has stepped
> forward to fill their shoes? From what I understand, the students
> graduate on August 18th (is that correct?) Does anyone know where we
> are at in the process of getting the machines ready for the students?
Under the table in the shop, where we store all the student boxes, are
between 13-15 "student pre-ready" boxes (which is WAY more than the head
count of the current class, meaning keep on building them, and we will
have achieved our goal of being one class ahead on Linux hardware by the
time the next class starts -- we have a box of cloned drives and 9 or 10
more PC-TEL 789 modems). That means that they have:
- workable (was last time we checked) hardware
- bootable (likewise) Debian Etch cloned hard drive, configured for that
specific graphics card
- working sound
- working NIC
- working PC-TEL 789 modem. Note, please check the
/etc/init.d/setmodemlink script -- in at least two instances, I forgot
to change the script to make it executable (as root, chmod +x
scriptname) ... which is pretty goofy of me. Just cd into that
directory, and do a ls -la to see all the properties for that file.
Easiest way to see if the symlink /dev/modem is correctly configured is
to boot up, launch KPPP, go to the "Modem" tab, click on "modem", then
(I think) "hardware", then click the button to "query modem". If it
responds that the modem is ready, things look good.
The other modem changes for the PC-TELs are, add a symlink
from /etc/rcS.d/ called S37setmodemlink and point it
to /etc/init.d/setmodemlink; and add to /etc/modules these drivers:
- pctel_hw
- pctel
- linmodem
AFAIK, steps 2 and 3 were done in all instances. But, please check.
Doc decided (and I completely agree) that for now, we continue to send
out kids graduate machines with a pre-installed, configured and working
modem. The reason is that, while install disks are available for
Windows machines, configuring modems under Linux can be just a wee bit
more tricky at times. This way, all the student has to do is set the
username, password, and ISP dial-up number in KPPP.
Now, on top of that table are several (4-5?) machines which now are
labeled "student pre-ready +". That "+" indicates that we have
double-checked the modem script being executable, are sure that the
modem is recognized via KPPP, AND that the machines have been thoroughly
updated, with software, security, and (after a required reboot due to
updating kernel images) also had "apt-get install openoffice.org" run to
get the most recent version of Open Office.
That should be done for the rest of the "student pre-ready" machines. I
will work on writing up another page of documentation, or maybe
rewriting the Parents Handout/FAQ, so that the section on dial-up
networking explains how to configure KPPP, and maybe even lists some of
the local dial-up ISP providers (earthlink, etc). Unless anybody else
would like to do this?????
> I ask because I was going to spend some time working with Doc to learn
> the things he does and with Steve to work on our volunteer base. But if
> we need extra hands for building machines, then I'll have to postpone
> working with them.
We have already more machines built than we need for the current class.
All the instructions for building these machines are on the wiki. Get
some of the other volunteers to build more, to finish apt-get
update/upgrading the ones that haven't had that yet, and focus on
working with Doc. Good test to see how well we have our processes
documented, yes?
t.
--
*** Propositions arrived at purely by logical
means are completely empty as regards
reality. - Albert Einstein ***
