Hi Tom,
CC'ing to the school list.
Thanks for your mail. I'm not really doing anything on the schools
project except providing moral (and occasionally immoral) support
right now: the mail you're referring to was from Leo Fernandez who,
along with Dhruv, Prateek and Pai, did all the hard work for the
school.
>>>>> "Tom" == anyaddress <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Tom> Hi all, I'm one of the volunteers who set up the systems here
Tom> in Goa. I'm following your posts with interest as you/ we
Tom> will be having similar problems to ours yours. Our machines
Tom> are mostly Pentium 1 (66 - 200 mhz) with 16 - 32 mb of ram
Tom> and the speed is okay (satisfying) the servers got 96 to 128
Tom> mb (166-200). There are 100 systems spread among 20 school
Tom> with 3-5 nodes each. We were "forced" to use gnome due to the
Tom> lack of hdd space. We additionally installed windomaker (if
Tom> the schools want something faster :)). We've got AbiWord and
Tom> gnumeric t'ill today - will be installing open-office from
Tom> tomorrow onwards.
We took a decision (sometime, unconsciously perhaps) to stick to KDE.
I think the main reason was concern about the free future of Gnome.
Koffice also played a large part in the selection of KDE, though now
the thinking seems to be more towards OpenOffice and further from
Koffice.
>> So folks, we have passed through the first two days of having
>> a Linux server in a school computer lab in Delhi for classes 4
>> to 8. We have RH 7.3 running on a Pentium 4 server with 640Mb
>> ram and 20 diskless workstations booting off the server into
>> X. LTSP is cool
>>
>> Software setup was painless. However identifying hardware
>> problems took 90% of time and energy. Defective bootroms,
>> network cable probs, mouse probs etc..etc... We were also hit
>> with DCOPServer
Tom> boy - same problem in Goa - too old hardware (was shipped
Tom> from the US) - and you know about the humidity down here.
>> errors. Couldn't figure out what went wrong. We worked around
>> that by avoiding multiple logon with the same id.
Tom> faced the same problem with gnome. Think this can only be
Tom> fixed by putting a pam module into gdm /kdm /xdm which
Tom> prevents several users to login with the sam id twice. As
Tom> far as I understand linux - this can never be smart on the
Tom> desktop - if one guy changes the desktop-backround it SHOULD
Tom> be changed on the other system according to that (as it's got
Tom> the same config files). We numbered the accounts
Tom> (user:student1 - passwd:student1, user:student2 -
Tom> passwd:student2, ...) and assigned them each to one system. I
Tom> think this is the smartest thing to do in this case - as if
Tom> you got many systems (if you let pam handle it) - a pupil
Tom> might have to login several times - until he finds an account
Tom> which is not taken yet.
>> However running X with KDE 3.0.0 from 20 diskless stations made
>> everything crawl - that's when we upgraded to 640Mb ram. We are
>> looking at options to improve speed.
Tom> Use ICE or XFCE I was told on the LTSP (will check that out
Tom> as soon as I got time) - discussion list. If nobody of your
Tom> guys is on that list yet - do your self a favour - lots of
Tom> usefull information - but - very high load.
We have one of the KDE developers (Sirtaj Kang) in Delhi right now and
he's interested in visiting the school and helping to understand the
problems and sort them out. I hope he manages to fix this requirement
of RAM. Ajith Kumar (the LTSP and GNU guru) also suggests that KDE
has become much slower between RH 7.1 and 7.3, and wants to try out a
downgrade to see if the speed problems get resolved.
>> Now the real test begins - how the students and teachers take
>> to it.
>>
>> There's a lot of hand-holding to be done and numerous mundane
>> tasks to take care of - like web pages with helpful
>> documentation subitable for teachers, for students at higher
>> classes etc. Some guide to basic operations is very much
>> needed.
Tom> pleeeease put them on the net. We didn't have time yet to
Tom> make up our docs - it's a must. Currently we're teaching each
Tom> and every teacher single. Though we'll be holding training
Tom> sessions for groups of teachers soon.
Ouch! OK, I'm sure that whatever we do develop will be made available
freely.
Tom> regards,
Tom> Tom
Regards,
-- Raju
--
Raju Mathur [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://kandalaya.org/
It is the mind that moves
