[ale] New Twiki topic LinuxInGASchools

[Jeff Hubbs]

Just some idle notes and thoughts...

On Mon, 2002-08-12 at 10:51, Dow Hurst wrote:
<snip>
> 
> Some of the ideas we tossed around were:
> Start small with a testbed situation such as setting up a local church 
> with LTSP using free hardware as our first learning experience.

Target churches that operate preschools.  My daughter went to Sandy
Springs United Methodist Preschool and they did/do get a number of
donated machines of fairly advanced age.  Similar churches may well have
similar piles of hardware.

> 
> Focus on LTSP as a leverage for old hardware.

Yeah!  LTSP, if nothing else, can be used as a study case for a more
elegant solution or it can be implemented as-is with modifications; I
took a shot at getting LTSP to work (diskless P/90 client) and found
that any KDE user can shut down the server (a non-starter, for sure!).

<snip>

> Recognize the installed base of hardware in schools would not 
> necessarily change so the proposals have to account for this.

Quite true.  It seems as though there are Macs and Wintel entrenched,
and the level of machinery on hand runs the gamut.  The sticking point
is going to be creating useful server hardware, but it's pretty clear
that the range of PCs that people are casting off for being too slow for
use with Win2K and WinXP are the ones that begin to make good servers.

R.D. Head Elementary in Gwinnett County is positively crawling with IBM
PS/2 300GLs.  They are PII machines, ~350-400MHz, with built-in video
and Ethernet.  I've worked with these machines before and I know that
they are positively horrible in Windows; one of my guys had one and it
would hang up every time he tried to copy a large file over the network,
and the video at high resolutions was oddly flickery.  I tried both
Win98SE and WinNT on another one and got similar results.  BUT, it ran
Linux very nicely - the video was just fine and the Ethernet was
flawless.  They have 300GLs at the Sandy Springs branch of the Fulton
County Public Library and they are murderously slow and crash-happy
under Windows and running IE.  However, for LTSP client, I estimate that
they're WAY overkill, but if they're all in place, then so be it - you
get your benefits elsewhere.  

It's the server side - whether for LTSP or just file serving - where
things get tricky.  If it were me, I'd be interested in something,
anything, into which I can cram disk drives, whether IDE or SCSI or
both.  The idea is to get RAID going fully, such that you can lose any
one drive and still have a running machine.  RAM is also important
especially under LTSP.  You could find yourself running many instances
of the same app on an LTSP server, and while in some cases that's not as
huge a RAM load as you might imagine, in other cases it will be and if
you push the thing into a heavy swapping regime, all users will suffer
at the same time. 

At least under LTSP, you CAN break up your app server requirements onto
multiple servers and in some cases this may be very desirable if the
nature of the network, disk I/O, or CPU activity for one app throws a
spanner into that of another app.  

Any and all infrastructure hardware MUST MUST MUST go on a UPS.  THAT's
where the money that would go for MS licenses should go.

<snip>

> Polish the project to perfection and sell it at the Board of Regents, 
> don't approach public schools at a low level due to entrenched 
> bureacracy and policies.

I very much agree; waste no time with anyone as low on the chain as a
principal.  

> 
> Look into locating churches and private schools for testbed situations 
> we can leverage.

See above re SSUMP.

> 
> Join with similar projects if possible and if applicable.
> 

What's the story here, Linux client on Novell server and/or vice versa? 
I've done NT/Novell and Novell/NT, but not Linux with Novell.  

> Explore integrating Linux with Novell, or any other legacy OS or 
> hardware currently used in schools.

I have dealt with Linux/VMS interoperability, but I dunno if any schools
have any VAXen or Alphas running.  There may be little point.

> 
> Really look into available educational Linux software and software 
> projects.  Recognize MS Windows won't go away due to educational 
> software currently used in schools unless we can find what is needed.

I feel that WinXX on the client side is inevitable.  Barring really
useful Linux software that justifies totally throwing a client over to
Linux, Linux' best use in the client role would be as a Web browser
platform, plain and simple.  This is also covered by LTSP deployments,
of course.  

> 
<snip>

At Head Elementary, I noticed that in the office, a splash screen for
SASIxp was visible.  You can read about this at
http://www.ncslearn.com/sasi/index.html.  I'd like to determine what, if
any, role Linux could play in reducing the deployment cost of that app.

On another note, every time I see a giant stack of PCs of any age, I
want to build a massive cluster.  I don't think this would have any use
other than at the high-school level and even that would be specious -
you'd have to kind of write a lesson plan around it or just make it
available for the ubergeek kids to mess with - but it'd sure be cool.

- Jeff


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