[K12OSN] Introduction and questions

Mike Ely mely at rogueriver.k12.or.us
Sun Dec 4 04:26:02 UTC 2005


Hi all,

I'm Mike Ely.  Just started up as the Technology Specialist for Rogue 
River School District #35 down here in Southern Oregon, and one of my 
top priorities is getting a student lab up and running at our middle 
school just in time for online state testing to be completed.

I've done LTSP before in a school district, but previously did most of 
the work myself as I used SuSE in order to take advantage of its tighter 
KDE integration and the most excellent Kiosk API that comes with that 
(and incidentally, was able to get linux to respect Active Directory 
group membership when choosing a skel directory for new user logins). 
In this case I really don't have a lot of time to build something from 
scratch, and have been meaning to try an education-specific distro 
anyhow, so this effort gets my nod.

I'm wondering if anyone here has information related to desktop lockdown 
for this distribution (I'm really rusty with Gnome, as I haven't used it 
at all on the desktop ever since the "spatial browsing" situation 
manifested).  I'd like student users to get a very limited desktop (that 
I define) and not be able to goof around with it - they can save their 
documents to a network share - and am willing to allow staff users 
access to more of a default general-purpose desktop.  My current 
environment is fairly straightforward: we have a Samba 3 domain for 
'doze clients, not nearly enough Macs, and for this particular server, 
all the student users will be logging in with the same domain account. 
This presents a potential difficulty with regard to Firefox and also 
with OpenOffice, as my recollection was that both of those applications 
really didn't much like being launched more than once by a given user.

If anyone's seen solutions to the particular problems I've mentioned 
above, I'd love the opportunity to avoid re-inventing the wheel, and 
also if anyone wants more information about the things I did with LTSP 
before (especially with regard to AD integration), I'll be more than 
happy to answer.  I look forward to working with this list.

Cheers,
Mike Ely
Technology Specialist,
Rogue River School District #35
Rogue River, OR 97537




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