in an attempt to learn more and more about linux, I thought this might be a good thing to try and propose.

Currently, my school has about 1500-2000 students, and about ... 150-200 Pentium 3 computers throughout the school... maybe more. I've read about thin client setups where they each use some of the server's resources. For P!!!s, I don't think that's necessary.

Attempting to show that a OSS solution is available, i'd like to make a mock setup that might be able to be used when the schoolboard wants to upgrade their OSes (they're running windows 2000 and some windows 98).

First of all, what sorts of boot options are the most realistic? Boot a kernel from a centralized server? Would I need to install a filesystem on each computer and then log in over the network after it boots itself? I assume that the computers at the school do network boots of Windows 2000 (I would ask the IT guy, but he's quiet and angry looking... plus he must be angered because a teacher and I have asked him to at least put Firefox instead of IE on the computers, and he said no.)

Also, would each of the programs need to be installed on each computer, or could I launch a program off a centralized server?

If I allowed people to run /usr/bin/firefox can I easily disallow them (or a group of them) as easy as going chown or chmod? Could I have generic KDE settings for all accounts that are not changable, say, if I wanted to remove any right click stuff that could stuff to their desktop, and screw around with the "control center" ; where would those files be?
(then again, Fluxbox with a desktop would work just as nice?)

I'm still a little confused as how it would be set up. If anyone can point me to some relevant reading, it'd be much appreciated.

I'm pretty sure my school has spent a lot on a lot of the equipment already, and they're running Novell stuffs... would an implementation of OSS be relatively painless if we already have a running network (other than software configurations)?

I'm not an IT guy, or even a graduate of highschool, yet, so I'm just saying, I can't use google that well... (actually there is too much information.)


If I have more questions, I will ask after googling,

I manage a school network of 240 or so workstations with 50 laptops thrown in. I love it when people come out with ideas to move their networks over to OSS, but the reality is you're going to find it a pain to manage. With school machines, kids screw around with things for the hell of it which is bad enough with Windows XP machines seriously locked down with GPO's. When we ran Win 98 machines it was awful - stick a boot disk in and have them restore from their backup image which took 5-10 minutes was easier than fix the machine. Linux gives them endless possibilities to mess around. Think how much time you can spend tinkering at home - now you need to do that at school to configure it 'just so' and then find the kids changing delightful settings you hadn't thought of or didn't know exist.

Also, hardware drivers *will* do your head in, I've been there. Unless you have matched hardware or similar brand of graphics/network/sound, etc. you're going to find it time-consuming rolling out installations. Centralised patch management is difficult under Linux in a school environment. Your tech is probably angry and quiet because he's overworked + underpaid, trust me. Grumpiness about Firefox may well be because he has enough to do without *another* bit of software some thinks it would be cool to run. Don't feel I'm putting you down, I'm not, but the reality is you're going to move on from school in a couple of years and will get more assignments coming in and unless your school tech can run a Linux system, your school will really struggle afterwards.

Schoolboards may well like the idea of saving huge sums on licenses, but many schools I've seen have been short-sighted in not understanding the financial implications of needing support for running things, plus look at staff training. How are your admin records managed + centralised? Can this be moved, securely, to a Linux solution, or can it be integrated? How many of your teachers understand Win 98 let alone something completely foreign like Fluxbox! Think about how much a bind printers screwing up are under Windows needing drivers re-installing - try managing 30/40/50 printers under Linux :-)

If you're serious about looking at OSS, don't try looking for plans to put to the schoolboard for moving systems to Linux just yet. Start small - grab OpenOffice and roll out that alongside whatever version of Microsoft Office or whichever office suite you have. Offer to burn CD's to any student or teacher that's wants it. Then look at the same with Firefox. Then Thunderbird (depending on whether you have e-mail in school). Get the art department involved - show them The Gimp and tell them they don't have to pay Photoshop Pro licence fees. Show music they don't have to pay Cubase fees for music recording by demonstrating Audacity. Get some of your older machines that are on their way out and try to make up a dozen or so machines running Ubuntu (off the top of my head) and setup a little computer lab for people on a lunchtime or after school just to run chat, e-mail + web browsing. See how they react and how the machines hold up.

I've been slowly doing just that for the last 18-24 months and starting to show benefits. Microsoft Office licenses won't be upgraded, and OpenOffice will be upgraded to OO 2 by Christmas. Firefox + Thunderbird are used for the most part across the school, with many people running these at home too. Our music + art departments are doing things they couldn't afford to do before. And we're still running Win XP on the desktop, but have slowly rolled out changes to the GPO's edging desktop settings, appearances + options more to what you're likely to encounter under KDE, with a tweaked Debian install looking at going into an old IT suite in the next 3/4 months running KDE, OO.o2, Firefox + Thunderbird and see how people find it.

Well, that's enough crap for you to be getting on with! Don't loose heart, but schoolboards are always tricky to deal with, techies even more so ;-) Learn more yourself otherwise when something goes wrong with your little apps under Windows, people will loose faith if they can't be fixed quickly. Some people will *always* resist change, so expect some people to grumble, but so long as you have fun, keep at it!

And let me know how it goes or if you need help!

thanks.

i have two other projects and this one is way too large.

I really appreciate the time you took, it was a big project, and I need a big project because I'm bored with everything else, but it is a little too big. I have two other smaller projects.


again, thanks

I wasn't trying to put you off, I encourage as many people as possible to try the alternatives, especially in schools where money is often so tight and hardware out of date! If you've got a couple of other projects to be getting on with, cool, but how about instead of looking at the school issue as one big project, look at it in smaller blocks just trying to help in some way by suggesting ways to implement open source software under the current Windows environment, helping out in computer science classes / clubs after school, offering a couple of hours a week with the tech guy?

Either way, have fun + enjoy it. Isn't worth bashing your head against a screen at 2.am if you don't get any enjoyment out of it at the end of the day!

What about reinstalling a disk image via pxe anytime a computer is broken? You can do this every week ends as well for instance. Saves a lot of time trying to figure out who has done what on which machine. Just keep some security on the pxe server high enough so nobody messes it up.

for sure, i'll take it slow.

something like this is huge. whereas, I could probably deal with learning to program more, and write a program. For instance, a marksbook program that publishes marks for the parents to access (with a password of course) at home... Or maybe maintaining a wiki for each class as an extra source for help and to get the kids contributing.

if anyone still can answer my questions, wicked

That would work, so long as you re-patched your boot image with security patches all the time, otherwise you have workstations pulling the image down to reinstall after a problem and don't have the updates. You could script something that checks for the latest updates on boot, download + install them, but adds to the wait time and knocks your bandwidth even more. Would also have to make sure you have your user's data stored across the network on an NFS server which should be a gimme anyways.

An alternative is similar to how our Windows workstations run. You could set a cron job to run at midnight on a Friday for example that runs partimage or similar to image itself, and save it to a separate partition, assuming you partition it so you can unmount the required partitions with the system running. This way, you can boot up, run partimage again and load up the latest image. Would mean you'd only last any security fixes or new software installed within the last week. I do that with my test machines at home incase I screw things up