[K12OSN] My Laptop

[Les Mikesell]

On Thu, 2004-11-18 at 09:53, Liam Marshall wrote:

> The problem I have is that taking student work home to mark is 
> troublesome.  What I do now is boot my laptop into windows at the end of 
> the day.  I have the server also running SAMBA and have a share 
> established for the student home directories.  I connect to this share 
> and run a batch file on it that copies all the data files from their 
> home directories onto my laptop's hard drive.  then I take it home and 
> mark it.

Instead of a batch file, make a shell script that runs on the server
and generates a tar archive of the files you want.  Run this command
through ssh from the place you want to drop the files and pipe
the output through 'tar -x' locally.  Or just do it all on one
command from the laptop like:

 ssh server '(cd /home && tar -c */homework)' | tar -xv

The nice thing about shell level unix is that you can take just about
any set of things you can do as a single step and combine them about
any way that seems useful.  The first part of that command will run
on the remote machine, the | and part after runs locally.


> I am now comfortable/confident enough with Linux that I would like to 
> set my laptop up to be a single boot of say Fedora Core 2 or 3.  
> Everything I do at home or school I can do in Linux.
> 
> But I want to be able to continue using the laptop to model the lessons 
> to the students through the projector.  This means I need to be able to 
> connect to the server's linux drive(s)/shares, and I need to be able to 
> dump the student's work to my laptop hard drive so I can take it home to 
> mark.

To run a single program on the server but display on the laptop, ssh
to the server and start the program by typing it's name.  The program
will start in a new window on the laptop.  If you want the whole
desktop to run from the server, configure the laptop to start in
text mode (init 3 instead of 5) and use 'X -query server' to get
a thin-client kind of desktop from the server, or 'startx' to start
the local desktop.  

> How can I connect to the server's shares while my laptop is booted up 
> through a stand-alone Linux distro?  And access my laptop hard drive, 
> and my laptop burner?

You can use NFS or samba mounts from the laptop, but for most of
your purposes, running the programs remotely from the server may
work better.

---
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com