Linux command/whatever that is equal to %username% in windows
 

Is there code in Linux that is equal to %username% that is on windows?

I am working at my school this summer as a technology assistant. The Director of Technology is not much of a Linux person and neither am I. I have just started getting in to Linux and I like it so far and pretty much the same goes for the Director of Technology. The servers here my school are all Windows Server 2003. We have some older laptops that currently have XP on them but they are pretty much junk. The assistant principal wants kids to be able to use them when they are being disciplined or I guess any time they need to. The problem is they are old and only have 256MB of RAM, so we are thinking about putting Linux on them, probably Open SUSE 11. My thought is that these laptops are good enough to have Linux put on them with a nice size SWAP partition on the HD. If anybody has any other useful thoughts or whatever I would appreciate it.

EDIT: I am also looking at this article right now http://blog.unixlore.net/2006/05/acc...-gnulinux.html to try to get our laptops do stuff with our domain, such as access home drives. This article mentions the $HOME thing but that is not the way we have our FP server set up. We are not planning on joining these laptops to the domain once we get an OS on them if it is Linux. Our domain is an Active Directory domain.

Thanks,
C_MAN

C_MAC,

For the first part of your question, the following commands will provide you with the current user name:

whoami
echo $LOGNAME
echo $USER

You can also use $LOGNAME and $USER in scripts if required.

For the second part of your question, I recommend you experiment with different distributions.

Regards,
opc

C_MAC,

For sharing files between Windows and Linux PCs, you are on the right track with Samba. Each major distribution has a Wiki for installing and configuring Samba. A quick Internet search brought up this one for Suse:

http://susewiki.org/index.php?title=Setting_up_Samba

Regards,
opc

Opensuse is probably as good a choice as any. Another one to check might be Edubuntu or skolelinux, both of which are Linux distribution specially made for educational establishments.

It is normally good to have an online connection with the laptops, which would mean you need to be able to connect them to the school lan. If you want to access windows shares over the network, the answer is samba (should be available on all distributions).

Far as I know Linux can connect to active directory. Not sure how though.

If you like linux then maybe it worth a look at taking out those windows servers and getting in the spin with Karoshi

www.karoshi.org.uk

I think you'll find this worth looking into: http://www.ltsp.org/

"LTSP workstations can run applications from Linux and Windows servers."