On 6 Oct 2007, at 03:22, maning sambale wrote:
Hi,
I am a new instructor on Basic GIS in a small college in the
Philippines.
We find it hard to request for a dedicated GIS lab for student to
tinker around.
...
With constant lobbying, I finally persuaded the department to explore
setting-up a dedicated GIS lab. No assurance on when and how will
this initiative will go through, but I was asked to write a proposal
on how do we plan to implement this project.
I would like to ask this list on experiences in setting up a GIS lab
for students (both for undergrad & graduate course). Initially, I
have the following on my mind:
hardware: 1 server, 5 thin clients
OS: Linux LTSP route (debian-based)
GIS applications: OSGEO stack (GRASS, QGIS, Mapserver)
databse and stats: R, postgesql
other apps: standard office applications (openoffice, firefox, pdf
reader)
online course management: moodle
Unfortunately, I have no experience with the thin client route.
I managed to take advantage of the fact that computers were being
replaced in our formerly windows-only GIS lab, to (1) install some
FOSS4G tools (QGIS, R, ...) on the new Windows setup, and also (2) to
repartition the machine so that it has a dual boot setup, offering
Windows XP or Fedora. The Linux side has GRASS, Mapserver, QGIS, R,
and associated utilities.
We set up one machine, then copy the hard drive image to all machines
in the lab, then go around to each one to just fix the computer ID/
hostname in each OS on each machine to make them unique. This was
"relatively" painless. I am also setting up a Fedora-powered server
to serve out a data directory with NFS (have used SMB shares in the
meantime), and I am thinking of adding an NFS-mounted /usr/local so
that I can easily add new software without having to modify each
client machine.
I realize this doesn't really match what you're proposing, and I
can't offer experience of relative pros and cons of each approach,
but if you do consider a local dual-boot option, I'd be happy to
share more experiences.
Cheers,
Scott Mitchell - Department of Geography and Environmental Studies
Carleton University - Ottawa, Canada
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