On Wed, 2006-04-26 at 19:05 -0400, Paul D. Fernhout wrote: > I previously wrote: > > Then you would have a custom Python which would be useful for wandering > > faculty (assuming the admins let you reboot the machine, and it was > > configured to allowing booting from removable media). > > I just noticed this: > http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonCd > "Welcome to your Python CD! This is a bootable CD based on [Debian > GNU/Linux and KNOPPIX. The special thing about it is that it has lots of > Python stuff!" > > Anyone used it? > > I'm curious: is it even practical to expect to walk into most modern > educational computer lab in a typical school and expect to be able to > reboot all the computers to run from your own Python CD? Do people's > school computer labs typically allow a boot from removable media?
I haven't used this CD, but we do have a similar disk with all of our Python-based robotics stuff here: http://pyrorobotics.org/?page=PyroLiveCD including a Python-based wrapper on a 3D simulator (Gazebo) that you can control from Python. You can drive a helicopter from Python! How cool is that? It is very practical to turn a regular lab of Windows machines into a lab of Linux machines (as long as they don't have the "boot from CD" locked down with a BIOS password, which they might. You can mount any disk and fiddle with it, so there are some security issues here.). Do note that you need to have a CD for each machine, as it reads from the CD as it needs to. This also makes it a little slower on the start-up. If your machines have good RAM and CD-ROM drives, you'll barely notice though. These disks are great for giving tutorials at workshops and conferences, and very nice to have so students can do their work at home. -Doug > I know it was quite possible to boot your own stuff when I ran an > educational computer lab (or rather, impossible to stop. with those > motherboards) but that was a long time ago (back in the days of 5-1/4 and > Token Ring). I don't know what typical admin policies would be now. But > todays' motherboards seem much more likely to have an option for picking > the boot medium on reboot (but also more options to disable media booting > which you would need to get into the BIOS settings to change). > > --Paul Fernhout > _______________________________________________ > Edu-sig mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig > -- Douglas S. Blank Computer Science Assistant Professor Bryn Mawr College (610)526-6501 http://cs.brynmawr.edu/~dblank _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
