Hi David,
If boot time is a concern, what I have been doing with both LTSP setups
and stand-alone workstations is use an SSD and mount / to it, and use a
big HD and mount /home to it (sometimes /var as well). Alternatively, I
sometimes mount just /boot to the SSD instead.
If you don't use an SSD for the booting, it's doubtful you'll get any
real improvement on boot time. You really don't need a big one, either.
If you're new to using SSD's, and want to give it a try, make sure AHCI
is enabled in your BIOS before you do the install, as well. I missed
that in one of my most remote installations and have been paying for it
for a long time (takes forever to read packages, and other things).
Thanks!
Adam Fischer
On 06/10/2015 09:31 AM, David Groos wrote:
Thanks Alkis for this information!
Based on what I now know, I'll...
--Continue with ltsp-pnp, all clients FAT.
--Give 14.04 a try with Unity/Gnome/Gnome-flashback/Mate and do some
simple boot-time benchmarking.
--Read up on flow control and do some experiments using the Epoptes
benchmarking tool (both things of which I was unfamiliar).
--Continue to use both ff and gc (now I know why gc works better
sometimes) even though ff is my preferred as it is more open sourc-esque
--Update the 2 nic install page for 14.04
Questions:
--I could put 2 hard drives on the classroom server and install the
system on one HD and /home on another HD. Seems like that would
significantly improve performance during those times when some clients
were booting and others were logging in, but that's just an idea. Your
guess/knowledge on this?
--Any additional "suggested reading" pages? With google translate my
Greek goes from 0 to 60 in under 10 seconds ;)
Finally:
--What's a way/s I can contribute back to your/our efforts of
ubuntu/ltsp in ed? I saw this page:
https://answers.launchpad.net/sch-scripts/+question/228810 but it's not
too current. I'm doing my own bit to resist the corporate, self-labeled
"education-reform" movement whose advocates think they can ignorantly
apply simplistic free-market principles to improve education. You can
imagine how that plays out in big-district technology bureaucracies.
From what I read, this corporate ed-reform movement is world-wide.
[stepping back down from the soap box...]
BTW Here's a blog post by a Finnish guy I've followed for many years. He
has many important things to say about modern/future education and about
technology and open source as well.
http://teemuleinonen.fi/2015/06/09/why-freelibreopen-source-in-learning-is-important/
Enjoy your summer,
David G
On Wed, Jun 10, 2015 at 1:07 AM Alkis Georgopoulos <alk...@gmail.com
<mailto:alk...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi David, sorry but I don't have the time to write an extensive how-to
(I already maintain one in Greek :)), so I'll only mention a few tips:
* We're still using Ubuntu 12.04.x because we have extremely varying
hardware, so some schools need the old Xorg and kernel from 12.04.1,
while other schools need the new ones from 12.04.5, and there were even
schools that needed a new kernel and an old Xorg.
That's due to unfortunate regressions of the newer software.
We also have an issue with Ubuntu 14.04 keyboard layout not working
properly in Unity/Gnome/Gnome-flashback, and another one with
gnome-keyring making thousand of files with SSHFS (LP: #1321922).
These 3 issues maybe don't affect many of the users here, so you can
probably just go ahead and use 14.04.
* I recently committed in LTSP a few fixes for Unity, so if you'll be
using the Greek schools PPA, you can select any desktop environment that
you want.
Gnome-flashback and Mate are also good choices, especially if you also
have thin clients where 3D doesn't work over the network and software
rendering is used instead, making Unity extremely slow.
* About the flow control issue (gigabit server, 100mbps clients) we've
recently updated our /etc/network/if-up.d/sch-scripts script so that it
works in all cases, so you can just follow this how-to I've written:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/FlowControl
* Firefox is a good browser. Sometimes a newer flash is needed though,
so it's nice to also have google-chrome installed, which has flash
version 18 instead of 11.
* And of course I always suggest to people to follow the ltsp-pnp page,
as it makes installation and maintenance much easier:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ltsp-pnp
Cheers,
Alkis
On 10/06/2015 07:12 πμ, David Groos wrote:
> I'm thinking that there are more people than just myself who
would like
> to know this info so am asking here. Right, Alkis, you are
probably the
> knowledge font here! Basically, what's the ltsp-pnp lab setup for
next
> school year in the Greek Schools?
>
> I'm looking for a (hopefully quick-booting) modern yet stable
> configuration. I'll be creating the new install in a month or 6
weeks.
> I'll be maintaining 5 classrooms including my own, each setup
will use
> the teacher computer as the ltsp-pnp server. Probably not
important, but
> I'll be using the 2 nic setup and a single gig --> (12-36 port)
100 mb
> switch. I imagine this is already written out online but have not
> succeeded in finding it. Each machine will have 2 gigs RAM and be
maybe
> 5-7 year old.
>
> Any preference for a browser or tricks to lighten the load of the
image?
>
> Thanks for your ltsp-in-schools leadership,
> David G
>
>
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