Sounds great. Network booting allows you to run complete distros only. It does not convert the PCs into thin clients. I am not talking about LTSP here.
Fedora, for example, can easily be configured to network boot. The full distro. The advantage is single system imaging. You are all running the same copy of Fedora, which means you run yum update once, and all your 500 machines are updated. Its just... from an admin point a complete no-brainer to run a single image. The other advantage is that your Linux installation virtually never crashes. With SSI, it is easy to maintain a backup of the known good working copy. Do your updates on a staging copy, test it on 10 machines for a week, then roll out the updates to other machines (just move a softlink around and you're done). The only other way for you to keep 500 machines updated, would be to have a local mirror of the Fedora/Ubuntu repo you use. Lots of universities do this. And remember, network booting means that every evening, you can switch all 500 machines into Beowulf mode. Meerut's fastest supercomputer by a long margin, I'm sure! And oh... this 100% non-destructive. Which means you can do this NOW, without erasing Windoze or anything else installed on your machines. You can switch all 500 machines to Linux one day, without changing anything on them (other than a BIOS setting to enable PXE). What does that mean? Any migration will have its hiccups. Migrating 500 machines dead turkey will make a lot of users very unhappy. This retains the dual boot option for as long as you want. Once you feel the migration is done, just SSH into the machines and nuke the Windoze copy on the HDD. On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 7:46 PM, Mohit Singh <gmohitsi...@gmail.com> wrote: > Hi Saurabh, > > > Thanks for a quick response! > > We have really started a mission to FOSSify complete B.Tech. CS labs > from first to fourth year. We want a full-fledged running GNU/Linux > system on each computer. We want to utilize a distro which may run > even on modest hardware with full support for software development > projects of B.Tech. > > So I am really talking about replacing Oracle with MySQL and Visual > Studio with ***** (something still under search - C,Java,JDBC with > MySQL,JSP will be used mostly). > > GLUG Meerut wanted this to happen and finally our chairman has given > us the green signal. I ask all the FOSSouls to help us do this. We are > going to ask many questions and solve many for the organizations > similar to us. > > > Mohit > > -- > Mohit Singh > ------------------ > > *Today's Imagination is Tomorrow's Innovation > Today's Innovation is Tomorrow's Common Sense > Today's Common Sense is Tomorrow's Nonsense > * -- http://saurabh.org.in _______________________________________________ Ilugd mailing list Ilugd@lists.linux-delhi.org http://frodo.hserus.net/mailman/listinfo/ilugd
