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

[Les Mikesell]

On Tue, 2006-10-31 at 19:24, Tom Wolfe wrote:

> 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"...

More realistically that's "we can't legally include certain
things in the distribution".

>  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. 

After installing k12ltsp, did you go into the 'Install additional
software" folder?

> 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.

OK, but first convince the people holding the patents to permit
free distribution.

> 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.

Most PCI cards should be detected automatically.  The sound on
some motherboards - like old Dell Optiplexes - is actually
on the ISA bus and not auto-detected so you have to add the
right module invocation for each model.

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

It should be available running directly on the client if you
activate it on an alternate screen. 

> 4. K12LTSP on Pentium I & II / 10 Mbps networks -- slow and unusable!

10Mbs is not a good choice for running everything over the network.

>  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.

Have you had a problem finding surplus equipment in that range? 
PII's should be fine if they are PCI with a decent NIC and
video card.

> Even then, something like
> Celestia crawls compared to the way it does with a local hard drive
> installation. Any tips? Am I missing something?

For more than a few terminals you need a gig uplink from the
server to the switch.  The terminal video performance will
depend largely on it's video card - no surprises there.

> 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.

SCSI drives would give better performance.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   les at futuresource.com