[K12OSN] Introduction and questions

Eric Harrison eharrison at mail.mesd.k12.or.us
Sun Dec 4 06:43:01 UTC 2005


On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Mike Ely wrote:

> Eric Harrison wrote:
>> On Sat, 3 Dec 2005, Mike Ely wrote:
>> 
>>> I've got a little bit of time - the lab is going to be exclusively used
>>> to run Firefox for state online testing for a few weeks
>> 
>> Which Oregon state online testing, TESA or ELPA?
>> 
>
> TESA.  We can handle the more-limited number of ELPA tests without needing to 
> build a new lab.

I've been doing a lot of TESA hacking and *should* have a good solution
for you. This is only tested on Fedora (3 & 4), Red Hat EL (3 & 4) and
CentOS (3 & 4). Odds are greater than 50% that it will work on SUSE ;-)

Everything below here assumes that you are using K12LTSP thin clients
(on Fedora, RedHat, or CentOS)

As previous emails have stated, at a minimum you need a unique account per
concurrent tester. Some of the schools I support use "tesa1", "tesa2", etc.
Worstation 1 uses tesa1, workstation 2 uses tesa2, etc (taped to the
monitors, or whatever works for you). It doesn't really mater the name of
the accounts, as long as they are unique (most have per-student accounts ;-)

For generic accounts:

   After creating generic accounts, and following the "TESA" install
   instructions below, at the K12LTSP login screen select the "TESA"
   session and log in as the generic account (tesa1, tesa2, etc). This will
   set the default session for that account.

For "per-student" accounts:

    Have them select the "TESA" session before logging in to take a TESA
    test.


Here are the release notes I sent out to my "beta" users. This assumes that
you are familiar with the official Vantage "secure" browser in specific and
K12LTSP/multi-user systems in general.  Don't be afraid to ask questions if
any of this does not make sense and/or doesn't work for you ;-)

----

I have my hacked version of the TESA browser ready for testing. This
should have similiar behavior to the official Vantage Linux secure
browser, with the following enhancements:

* It uses Firefox or Mozilla, depending on what you have installed,
   which gives nice anti-aliased fonts. MUCH EASIER to read than
   the Vantage browser

* It only uses about a megabyte of disk space, and all users share
   a single copy.

* Users are automagically registered, you don't have to do the
   registration process for every single user.


This is at the "works for me" stage, your mileage may vary.
I've tested this on Fedora Core 4 and CentOS 4. I've only tested
with GDM, but KDM should work as well.


Requirements:

         wget
         openmotif
         firefox or mozilla

Usage:

This works like my previous setup, the script creates a login session
named TESA. If you select the TESA session and log in, it will startup
firefox or mozilla using the Vantage chrome and will refuse to do
anything else until you exit the browser, at which time the user will
be logged out. The behavoir of the browser & window manager should be
fairly close to that of the official Vanguard secure browser.

There is no special setup, the user is automatically configured and
registered to access TESA when they log into the TESA session.


Installation:

         wget http://k12linux.mesd.k12.or.us/tesa/ff/tesa-install.sh
         sh ./tesa-install.sh



No additional configuration is required. Once the install script
completes it should be ready to use.






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