[K12OSN] Support for a KDE-centric branch?

[Mike Ely]

Hello list,

A lot of the questions I see in here have to do with issues of
customizing or locking down various aspects of the desktop, login
manager, etc.  The sad fact is that Gnome is *terrible* where this is
concerned - the basic Gnome philosophy seems to be  that reduction of
complexity is always a positive outcome.  While this may or may not be
true for Grandma, it is far from what an LTSP administrator is going to
need - one of the great benefits of an LTSP system is that you can make
very specific changes on one server and have that change propagate to N
number of desktops.

My experience over the years is that KDE is a much better fit for
deploying LTSP systems in almost any environment, but particularly in
K12 labs.  With KDE, you get the advantages that the desktop environment
provides, while still being able to access GTK based applications, and
you'll also have a better file browser and browse dialog and more mature
desktop lockdown tools.

I'm sure that there are other people in here who feel this way.  I'm
willing to put in work to create a base distribution for K12 people
wishing to deploy LTSP in an easy fashion, a K12LTSP (KDE Edition) if
you will, with all the educational software and ease-of-setup gained
through the very hard work put in by K12LTSP, and all the advantages of
the KDE environment.

My idea right now is to use OpenSuSE as the base distribution, as it's
currently my hands-down favorite where KDE distros are concerned,
although I'd be very willing to do this on Kubuntu, provided a timeline
exists to work out some of the quirks in the Ubuntu method of doing
LTSP.  I'd also want to see what sort of management tools are coming
forward - YaST is in the end a very effective and easy tool to learn to
use, and so far I haven't seen anything like it out there.

The point here is not to copy K12LTSP feature-for-feature, but rather to
create a fully-integrated KDE-centric learning environment for LTSP
systems that is easy to install, maintain, and use.  Where intersections
exist in the versions, so much the better, but that's not necessarily
the goal of this project.

Anyway, how about it?  Anyone willing to pitch in with me to help out
with packaging and installer?  If the distro is to be OpenSuSE, I'm
pretty sure the autoinstaller feature in YaST can be used to build
ourselves a distro in short order.  The tricky bits would be integration
of LTSP into the base install, which would involve creation of a YaST
module and making sure that gets launched during the install process.
Neither of those tasks are terribly difficult.  Other important
discussion would involve selection of packages, defaults, etc.

If this discussion gains any traction, I'll create some web space and
various tools (svn, etc) for us to get started on.  Let me know.

Cheers,
Mike Ely