Hi everyone, I am new here, and I have been reading the list for the last few days with great interest. I wanted to introduce myself and then ask a quick question. My name is Kari; I am the administrator for a small Catholic school in a rural IL community. I recently talked the principal into letting me buy all new computers and I sold him on the idea of Linux (about which I knew only enough to be dangerous). I had never played w/ Linux before taking the job as admin at the school but I do have quite a bit of windows networking experience (like NT4, 2000, 2003 servers). I got a friend to help me with setup -- edubuntu on the workstations, ubuntu server. He knew quite a bit about linux, so he set the whole thing up and moved the data from the SuSE hard drive to the Ubuntu HD and whatnot. He is no longer available to answer setup questions, and I have no documentation as to what exactly he did. My questions are: 1. He set up SMB-LDAP to authenticate on the server. Does anyone have any experience with this? I need to reinstall edubuntu on a couple of servers but am not sure what the procedure is to get them to login to the server. 2. My younger kids *really* like GCompris, but it dies, crashes, and is generally uncooperative when the workstation is logged in to the server. It works great on machines that are logged in locally. Any ideas about how I can remedy GCompris' performance for students who are logged in to the server? 3. My students want to write a school newspaper. Besides OO Writer, does anyone have any suggestions for a MSPublisher-comparable tool that is open source? I tried horsing around w/ Scribus but never could make anything in Scribus print. Everything else on the workstations prints just fine. Scribus seemed a little too InDesign-like anyway, and the 7th graders found it extremely difficult. I look forward to getting to know all of you. I am hoping soon to have a "grand opening" of my lab, complete w/ pix and video on the web, so you all can see what's going on. I'd love to hear more about your configurations at your schools, too, and what programs you're using. I teach technology at my school -- do any of you teach? Any interesting curriculum ideas or suggestions out there? I'm also interested in ideas about training computer-phobic staff who think that Linux will give them the plague. LOL , the staff at my school are terrified to give the workstations a look around for fear of breaking something. I'm sure that's not a unique experience. Best, Kari Matthews <a href="http://www.smswestville.k12.il.us">www.smswestville.k12.il.us</a> (under construction -- a brand new Joomla site that is not quite ready but is getting there)