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

[David Trask]

"Support list for open source software in schools." <k12osn at redhat.com>
writes:
>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.

Ain't always philosophical....in some cases it's illegal....thus by not
putting them into the distro...it's left up to the individual to decide
what is right and what is wrong.  You can install 99% of the codecs you
need.  The win32 codecs will solve your issues in most cases.  We are able
to play most any content.

>
>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.


Booting with floppies is a piece of cake.  In fact, it's easier to make a
floppy than it is to put in a NIC.  The Universal Boot Floppy (included
with K12LTSP) will boot almost anything.
>
>
>3. rdesktop -- why isn't this standard with K12LTSP installation? Sure,
>it's
>easy enough to yum install rdesktop, but...??

Not sure this is the case with rdesktop, but in some cases....the
development of a program is such that it never stands still....thus it
makes sense to simply let the user install it and therefore get the latest
version in the repository
>
>
>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?

First of all, a Pentium III is OLD hardware.  (we don't have anything less
than P4's anymore)  We had PIII's and PII's but then we just ended up with
way too many....so we weeded out.   Nonetheless, if you are going to use
PII's and below, you'll probably need to use a lightweight window manager
like IceWM.  (We use it even with powerful thin-clients as it's a lot
faster and more configurable)  OpenOffice and the like will be deathly
slow on 10baseT....use something like Abiword and gnumeric on those
machines....or upgrade the NIC.  Celestia crawls on any thin-client
because it's so video intensive.  Until we get local apps set up so its
easy to use....Celestia is impractical.  Use KStars....that runs fine and
is actually educationally "more sound".
>
>
>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.

Next, is the server beefy enough?  Are you using gigabit NICs going to
gigabit switches or ports?
>
>
>...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.

No problem....this is how we all learn   :-)  Ask away!  :-)
>
>
>Despite the hurdles I'm pretty interested and optimistic. It seems like an
>amazing project, though certainly NOT "easy and working, duh?" yet.

Everyone's situation is different...for some it's a breeze as they have a
bunch of the same hardware, a good clean network, and a powerful
server.....for others, they may be trying to cobble things together.


David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Director
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcsvikings.org
(207)923-3100