[K12OSN] Accelerated Reader/Renaissance Place

[Eric Brown]

Brad,
You don't mention how fast your processors are, but it has been my expirence
that more processors are better.  I run a quad P3 550 MHz with 3 gb ram, and
I have supported 22 clients, and even three kids in another part of the
school on VNC.  OpenOffice took a while to start up (about one full minute)
with that many users, but once it was up it ran fine.  Your milage may vary.

I showed it to as many teachers that would listen to me.  Nearly everyone
really liked it, but since it wasn't Apple, our technology coordinator isn't
interested in putting similar labs in other places in our district.  The
monitor of our one drop-in lab and our librarian both wanted the same setup.

I've not had a chance to use my lab for any Renaissance Place for the
students, but I was able to access the reports for teachers very eaisly.

Good Luck
Eric Brown

-----Original Message-----
From: k12osn-bounces at redhat.com [mailto:k12osn-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf
Of Brad Johnson
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 6:57 PM
To: k12osn at redhat.com
Subject: [K12OSN] Accelerated Reader/Renaissance Place

Greetings everyone,

Let me start off by saying that I've followed this list for the better part
of a year without ever posting anything, so I'm a first-timer.  I am the
technology director for a 5 school district with approximately 1500 students
in Iowa.  With our ever-shrinking budget, I have been pushing for Linux on
the desktop for some time.  My superintendent loves the idea, and is totally
for LTSP throughout the district.  Naturally, we have some school board and
staff members that are not entirely receptive to the idea....you know the
drill....we need Microsoft, etc.
At any rate, this summer I purchased the materials to build a dual
processing opteron server with 4 gigs of memory.  When I told the
superintendent about the purchase and the cost(roughly $1600 from
Newegg.com) he really fell in love with the idea.  Last week, I finally
talked a teacher into allowing some of her old junkers to be "upgraded"
to LTSP thin clients, as well as a computer in our high school media center,
and one additional client in my office.  The immediate reaction is very
positive--teacher and other staff members are very impressed with the speed
of the system!  I would eventually like to put about 20 clients on this
system to see how the system reacts under a pretty full load.  Can any of
you comment on a fully loaded (20-25 clients) running on a dual opteron, 4
gig, WD Raptor hard drive setup?

Now on to my real question.  Are any of you using the web-based version of
Accelerated Reader(Renaissance Place) with LTSP or Linux?  If so, how is it
working for you?  The people at Renaissance have assured me that this will
indeed work, but can't give me the names of any districts that are currently
using LTSP with RP.  When I go to RP website, I am able to use their sample
quizzes within Firefox with no problem, using the flash plugin.  I am going
to try to convice RP to let my district test/pilot RP with LTSP/Linux so I
can be assured that I'm not going to pay for a product that won't work.  Any
comments/advice welcome.

Regards,

Brad Johnson

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