Hi
All
I am converting the
lab of my children's primary school with 35 motley old
donated machines
from Windows to Edubuntu. They are mostly PII 266
MHz
and Celeron 333 MHz
with 64MB RAM. We will buy a new machine for a single
server, and get switches with two
Gigabit
ports for the server and 100 Mbps for
the thin
terminals.
I teach electronic
engineering (digital signal processing) at UJ, and although
computers are not my
speciality, I am comfortable building up and installing PCs.
I
have supported networks of ten or so machines in a
Windows
environment.
However, I am a
complete Linux newbie.
I have followed
Linux since 1994, and always thought it a Good Idea to try it
out.
The compelling
reason to
actually do so now, was that the school contacted me
last
month to
join others and sponsor the replacement of one machine in the
lab.
The
current
PCs will
not run Windows XP or Office XP, and they feel left behind.
Having gone through
the upgrade cycle more than once, knowing the schlepp of
supporting many
machines (software especially), and considering any current
entry
level PC
to be way overspec for use as a learner workstation, I
started
searching the web.
When I found Edubuntu, it clicked immediately.
Reading on the website:
"As an educator you'll be able to set up a computer lab,
or
establish an online learning environment, in an hour or less -- then administer
that
environment without having to become a fully-fledged Linux geek," I
thought
this was going to be
a piece of cake. It wasn't.
websites,
the TuxLab
Cookbook, SkoleLinux
documentation, edubuntu-devel
I have even lurked
in the IRC room, which
I have to do from home, because
my employer blocks
IRC access on the campus.
Downloading and installing
Edubuntu
LTSP server on a test machine proved
to be the
easy part.
Getting all
the thin clients to work is still a headache.
Thank you for
everyone involved with Edubuntu. I believe it is an excellent
project, and
considering its age, remarkably mature. However, it might be
better to manage
down some expectations. Many of my problems probably
originate
upstream
from the Edubuntu itself, but that doesn't help me.
So here are some of
my current issues, first hardware related:
Terminal
booting:
My Dell laptop with PXE network card
boots flawlessly after invoking
the Boot Menu with F12 and
choosing onboard NIC as boot device.
The old (c.1998) motherboards' BIOS would not recognize a PXE
NIC
even if installed. So I found Paolo
Salvan's Multi-driver remote boot
program and now boot from floppy (hopefully an interim
measure).
This program finds and works with a variety of network
cards.
*** A network card with Asix chip AX88140 only gets halfway
through
the boot process, then freezes after giving the following
message:
"[4294684.802000] eth0: Setting full-duplex based on MII#1
link
partner capability of 45e1."
I
have 22 of these cards, so a solution would be appreciated.
Video
card:
*** A generic S3 Trio 64+ card seems not to be recognized.
The text terminals are fine, but X goes into black and white
mode.
Can I specify the video card in a configuration file?
Mouse:
The serial mouse, and on some motherboards the PS/2 mouse
was not recognised. I found the solution in the mailing list
archive:
Add a line with the word psmouse in the kernel modules
file.
I
used the text editor nano in a terminal:
$
sudo nano /opt/ltsp/i386/etc/modules
Newer hardware seems
to be well supported, but the whole point of
recycling old PCs as
thin terminals is missed if they will not work.
Hardware for the
server is not entirely trivial either. As the school was
looking to replace
35 machines, I can consider a high end server.
should not exceed
the price of 5-10 new entry level machines:
Dual 64 bit Xeon/Athlon M/B, cheapest processors, 4 GB ECC
RAM
dual Gigabit LAN, RAID-5 SCSI disks, DVD writer for backup,
UPS.
Supporting more than
10 or 20 terminals with a single machine seems
to put some strain
on ordinary workstation hardware posing as a server.
A software
question: How do you load hundreds of learner accounts
on
Edubuntu?
What about password generation? I could get a machine
readable file with
their particulars from the current school administration
system. What about
user groups for every class in order to deal with
age differences? Is
there a tool for this? I can't find any in Edubuntu.
Another software
issue: For political reasons I may have to use
Wine to allow for the use of legacy
Windows software :-(
or have all the
machines dual boot into Windows 98.
Has anyone used Wine
with MS Word and Powerpoint? Version?
I know OpenOffice is
AsEasyAs, but the decision is not mine.
Hopefully this will
be transient.
Lastly, does
Edubuntu have posters to liven up a computer lab? Ours
currently
reminds me
of a jail cell, with the iron bars, small windows
high
up
on the
wall, and all that computer beige sitting on the
workbench.
How about
bright stickers for the cases?
I am determined to
have our lab up and running when the new school
year starts in January, even if I
have to buy video and network cards
and program the
bootROMs.
Thanks for any
feedback & input.
Hendrik Boshoff
Department of Electrical & Electronic
Engineering
University of
Johannesburg
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