[K12OSN] K12LTSP missing some important stuff for our school purposes

[Tom Wolfe]

Hi folks,

I've been test driving K12LTSP a little, and have done some looking around
the lists and googling to see if any resolutions to some issues I've notice
are there... and thought I'd run things by this list.

1. A shortcoming in general with Linux is default support for (proprietary)
internet multimedia formats. The typical response from K12LTSP supporters
seems to be "We decided to not support proprietary formats"... but
realistically, I need to provide students with *easy* access, for example,
to CBC's website (http://cbc.ca) which has windows formats as its default
(*very* limited .ogg support) :( Real Player, Shockwave and Flash are other
examples. 

We can philosophically decide to not support proprietary formats, but in
doing so we are also deciding to deny students access to (the bulk of?)
internet multimedia information.

I believe that these need to be supported by any OS used in an educational
setting. Like pdf files, these are just way too entrenched to dismiss, and
they should be supported by default.

2. Sound -- I have about 25 workstations I'd like to use with K12LTSP... but
they are all pretty diverse platforms: many different NICs, sound cards, and
video cards. Is there any easy way to do this...? Or is it a matter of
researching each individual hardware setup to get things rolling? I'm
thinking of sinking for a couple dozen $20 network cards so that at least I
have that in common. Besides, booting workstations with floppies seems to me
to be too much of a hassle.

3. rdesktop -- why isn't this standard with K12LTSP installation? Sure, it's
easy enough to yum install rdesktop, but...??

4. K12LTSP on Pentium I & II / 10 Mbps networks -- slow and unusable! I see
lots of people talking about using old hardware with K12LTSP but I'm only
getting acceptable performance from PIII/500+ MHz 100 Mbps NIC, and this
seems to me to be a minimum hardware requirement. Even then, something like
Celestia crawls compared to the way it does with a local hard drive
installation. Any tips? Am I missing something?

BTW, my Dell SC1425 server works fine so long as I don't use it as an X
terminal itself... something to do with the video card, but I'm not worrying
about it for now.

...and if any of this has been over-discussed already my apologies, please
ignore or refer me off list to the right place for answers.

Despite the hurdles I'm pretty interested and optimistic. It seems like an
amazing project, though certainly NOT "easy and working, duh?" yet.

Regards,
Tom Wolfe
Morley, Alberta