[K12OSN] Interesting conversation....concepts vs. OS

Debbie Schiel debbie at redeemer.qld.edu.au
Fri Dec 17 02:06:19 UTC 2004


Hi David,

I found this post very interesting, especially  where you describe your 
three OS setup where students can *choose* the best OS suited for a 
task. And the bit about teaching word processing concepts in one app and 
then testing to see how their skills transfer in a new/different app. 
I'll be using that method in my class next year, thanks!

I'm hoping you can offer some advice here about dual booting -

Our mini-lab of PIIIs is setup so that the default boot is a network 
boot to the K12ltsp server. Students can however press 'Esc' and then 
boot to windows on the hard drive. Fine for PCs that can do a network 
boot like that but what about older PCs? We don't have a windows 
terminal server to connect to via rdesktop, if we did I'd convert the 
older PCs to thin clients and that would be that.

I've converted older PCs to thin clients by copying a rom-o-matic floppy 
to the entire hard drive using method described here: 
http://www.k12ltsp.org/phpwiki/index.php/Technical%3ABooting%3AClient%3ALiLo

So I was wondering if I could modify the method above. A rom-o-matic 
floppy boot on a PC starts off with a query like 'Boot from Network or 
Quit?'.

Now I don't know if this can be done because I don't know much about how 
partitioning hard drives works, but this is what I would like to do:
I'd like to copy the rom-o-matic floppy to a *portion* of the hard drive 
   which loads first; it asks me the question 'Network or Quit?' and 
then if I say Quit, it loads up windows on the other portion of the hard 
drive.

IS IT POSSIBLE?

That way we can have both linux & windows on the older PCs instead of 
just linux (some teachers won't be happy with that) or just windows (*I* 
won't be happy with that!). Also - it leaves the choice of OS up to the 
kids.

Thanks,

Debbie
-- 
http://www.redeemer.qld.edu.au/




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