Hi,
I thought it'll be nice to tell you that we are starting a testing period at my school, which will show if redhat is going to replace most (if not all) Windows systems.
I created a theme called trinitylinux, which is very common to most windows users (we wanted to make it easy for everyone)...
In my next posting you can find 4 links to the skin, please tell me what you think about it!

On the Desktops besides the theme, firefox and openoffice, which programms should be installed on the school pc's?
Is there a nice website with education software outhere?

Newbie question which folders should I lock completly (root, lost+found are already locked by redhat)? How do I need to sat the rights (for group and others if I don't want them to use it, but maybe have files for the theme inside)?

And the last one, how can I shut down 20 linux redhat 9.0 boxes from one redhat 9.0 server? How do I set that up...
the root user and password is on all 20 boxes the same...

Regards Fritz

PS: I am quiet excited about the whole project and hope that you can help me to make the testing phase a true succes

There are four picture links in my signature....
What do you think of the skin?

Ewww. It looks like... Windows. You took all the icons from XP, and even put the M$ Outlook, Excel, Powerpoint and Word icons on it. And I don't like what you have put where the start button normally is.

Interesting and friendly for ex Windows users. Good Idea.
How are you planning to manage your user logons?

We're building a schools system to create teachers lesson plans, curriculum development and admin and enabling teachers online collaboration in these tasks. So I'm interested to know the scope of what you are doing. Is it to provide the normal worprocessing / spreadsheet tools or are you also planning to run admin and curriculum development applications over the linux network?
Nice work. Good luck

Hi,
@somerobot yeah it's xp like, but for a reason. The kicker button is the school shield.
@phonecian at the moment students logon with one general user name and one general password, however since we are a small school I was thinking about giving out individual user and password's to log the people's behaviour.
The Linux is going to be set up in one computer lab, so yes it is going to be more than office which is run their.
Which curriculum development applications do you use, and where did you get them?
The scope needs to cover programs for the languages and should also include good research tools, because the pcs are in the library...
Regards Fritz

Why do you have the icons from M$ office? Why is there a folder named My Documents? Copying the Windows look is wise, but not when you start becoming inaccurate. Otherwise very nicely done.

last thing you'd want to do is have M$ stating legal action against a school for copyright issues....

hi there

u can have a look at k12 organization which are using LTSP along with redhat
altough u do not need that setup but u can look what softwares they recommend for schools

k12LTSP.org
also are u using user logging to a server
then a have alook here also
i am developing a software for that , and i have finished with version 1.0 but i am upto documenting that to upload it

http://masand.sourceforge.net

regards


regards

Hi there,
k12ltsp sounds great!!!
I will test that with 3 three machines, but I want to use Redhat 9.0 with my new theme to run on all the clients (so the terminal server needs to have that installed!).
What kind of server would I need to build (it should be expandable so that at the very end it would run 25 workstation smoothly!)...
How does the setup for a workstation works, you boot in a floppydisk created on the server?
Has anyone runing redhat 9.0 on networkboot (=workstations without harddrive), how do you manage the user thing (everyone has an account and when he logs in has his own folder?)?
I was glad that I was able to install Redhat but I am willing to put a lot of work into this project and I think this terminal application thing is just a great thing to lower the maintainance work dramaticlly!
Where can you get those thinclients by ibm for a good price (espically the cases)! What configuration would you put in the thin clients?

Regards Fritz

PS: The MS icons will be replaced thanks for the legal notice, it was just thought for a short period of time, but well I will find other icons...

You can network anything in nearly any variety of Linux. In schools, a real issue is network security and one the benefits of Linux is that it is quite easy to centralise data and stop users from going where they shouldnt. One of the weaknesses in Linux though is central login. There are ways to do it but making the logging in secret over the wire is not so easy. LDAP seems to be the way to go but if you cruise the web looking for comments about implementing it, you'll meet people going crazy everywhere.

If you are only talking about say 20 desktops in a lab and if each machine has identical hardware and peripherals, you could build one machine, setting up all the users on that machine and then ghost the hard disk image onto the other machines. That gives you secure local logon and you can still centralise the data on a server and move it around securely. Its just a pain that whenever you need to add a user you have to repeat the whole process of making a ghost image on one machine and then reghosting every machine.

Where data needs to be secure - I'm thinking mostly of school administration data and expecially information about children - an easier solution is to choose applications that provide enryption and certified logging in as a part of the application itself.

At least that's the approach we decided to take because most schools cant afford specialised IT personnel to manage complex IT infrastructures.

so you think it is not a good idea to use thin clients without harddrives, because it is just so complicated
I think it must be great, we have a redhat box runing for over 4 years without ONE crash...
if all our windows machines would run without 1 crash a day it would be just great, it is not about the security it is more about the maintaince...
the computers are used for writting and internet research in a library, so they really don't need to be high-end but we have so much trouble with windows, and I think it would be great to put the harddrvies together instead of filling every old machine up with redhat 9.0....
also I would like to buy thin client cases to give the whole library a better look with the old components inside and new flatscreens...

Regards Fritz
PS: The CPU's and all that is not 100% the same on the machines in the library, is that a problem for booting from a network?

hi there

ragardsing thin clients, have u visited the link i gave u??

also u can try for XDMCP, it will allows ur client with hdd to bootup and log in to the server

also what faciliites do u wish to provide with the server which will handle 25 machines??

regards

great work at coping the XP desktop look. i like the school shield as the start button too, gives it a nice internal marketing look. great concept at putting that shield every place you can think of.

FYI i much prefer the shield background over the default XP background, but that is just me.

only program i would consider adding would be some kind of video display, i would patch for MP3 support as RH9 does not have any support for MP3 you have to search for it, and hope you done screw things up before you get that rpm installed. i would use thunderbird for a mail client.

on one of the systems you should have apache running to host an internal web page that the students can gain access to things like MB per their classes to help the teachers keep better communications with the students, etc... things like that.

other wise, keep up the great work. looks good so far.