[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
More information about the K12OSN
mailing list