Hi Liam On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 15:05 -0500, Liam Marshall wrote: > They are a little slow when 30+ workstations all load StarOffice 7 at > the same time, or when they log out.
I would imagine that they would get slow. StarOffice is quite disk, cpu and memory intensive, and will hit your server hard. I think that adding more RAM would already make your situation much better, since 2GB RAM is a bit insufficient for 30 users already (less than 64MB RAM per user). You probably go into quite a bit of swap when 30 users fire up OOo, and going into lots of swap is very bad for an LTSP server. > 1. Is Edubuntu as easy to setup as the K12LTSP distro? I have played Edubuntu is quite easy to set up. It doesn't have a graphical installer like K12-LTSP, but it's just a matter of entering some information in text boxes and pressing enter, which practically anyone who has installed any Linux distribution would be able to do. The LTSP setup is 99%-100% automated. The only time you need to do the additional 1% setup is when you choose an IP range outside of 192.168.x.x for your server. In that case you just need to reflect the change in your dhcpd.conf file, which just takes a minute. > 2. Sound has always been an issue. (on the workstations) very > infrequently, the sound cards on the workstations produce sound. But > mostly they do not. How is the sound on the thin clients connecting to > Edubuntu? Sound is supported in the upcoming Edubuntu dapper release. There are some tricky situations with sound and thin clients, for example, sound in flash almost never works, and it seems unlikely to work soon, since Macromedia hasn't released a new flash plugin/player for Linux in ages. It seems we'll have to wait for the GNU flash player to evolve. > 3. Can anyone convince me/give me good reasons to switch to your > distro? I mean, what in your opinion makes you better/different from > K12LTSP? This is just off the top of my head, and these are some of my favourite reasons, so there's probably some more I'm leaving out. Firstly, it's more secure, which isn't always a top priority for schools, but as a school administrator, I would be happier knowing that a clever kid won't be able to sniff data over the network, etc. I wouldn't like a finger pointing at me when a test gets leaked or something. Edubuntu uses SSH to get the remote session to the thin client, instead of XDMCP, which is more secure and efficient. Then there's both the amount of packages available for it, and the quality. You don't have to download software from sourceforge and compile it, nearly everything you'll need to install is an apt-get install away (or through a few clicks on Synaptic, the graphical package manager). Upgrades are also smoother than on K12LTSP boxes. If you have a spare machine that you can play on, I strongly suggest that you install Ubuntu on it and experiment a bit. I also work on the tuXlab project, where we install open source labs in South Africa. We initially used K12-LTSP in our schools too, but upgrades were tedious. Every time a new version of Fedora Core were released, the old one immediately became obsolete. With Ubuntu, we were at least assured of an 18 month support cycle, so we switched to Ubuntu in June last year, by that time most of the labs were running FC1 or FC2. The labs have been running much more stable with Ubuntu than with FC, although performance is just about the same, probably because we use exactly the same software that we used to on FC. We're going to switch to an Edubuntu / Xubuntu combination next, which should increase performance and efficiency quite drastically. hth -Jonathan -- edubuntu-devel mailing list edubuntu-devel@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/edubuntu-devel
