Last week Saturday Jeff Zidek and I met with Michael Bishop, tech
coordinator of McKinley and Farrington Community schools. Their needs
were desktop computers capable of running this Windows foreign language
training software "Rosetta Stone" and simple Samba file shares.
Their earlier testing with plain Wine managed to run Rosetta Stone quite
well, however sound didn't seem to work. I tested with CodeWeavers Wine
and it seemed to work a bit better, and CodeWeavers CrossOver Plugin did
the job completely perfectly. Rosetta Stone is a fairly simple Windows
gui program but it depends on Quicktime for sound output. Based upon
the testing I believe it would be possible for Linux desktops to do the
job with a tweaked copy of free Wine, however a site license of
CrossOver Plugin may be beneficial in order to use all the Windows
browser plugins, stuff that end users tend to expect these days.
They were initially thinking about Linux thin clients for Rosetta Stone
+ Wine, however due to the CPU requirements this is infeasible. We will
instead supply Pentium II's and higher to do the job. We may need to
buy additional RAM for the desktops. Each machine will NFS root boot
the entire operating system from the server in order to keep maintenance
costs lower. Gigabit fiber is at the site so this should work well.
The site also has a Windows lab that will soon be running Rosetta Stone
too. We discussed mapping drive letters there to Samba file shares in
order for those desktops to reach the language CD's that the application
needs. A quick test of this worked well. Later we may setup Samba PDC
for authentication in the Windows lab.
Warren Togami
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
