[K12OSN] teaching kids sys admin with VM's

[Robert Arkiletian]

On 1/17/08, Steven Santos <steven at simplycircus.com> wrote:
> Do your clients support booting via USB drive? If so, that might be your
> simplest and most cost effective option.  Install the OS to the stick, and
> then the students can take the stick with them.


They are 233 PII's. So no usb boot but they do have usb 1.0 ports. I
can boot DSL (Damn Small linux) from floppy with DSL on a usb stick
since DSL uses kernel 2.4 which fits on a floppy. I have done this
before with limited success.

Currently I have installed Slax live linux on the tiny 2GB HD on the
clients with lilo to dual boot to ltsp or slax. Nice thing about Slax
is any changes to the OS dissapear after reboot. It's good for
teaching ssh, sshfs or things that require a student to have a
separate ip (ie. networking) and things that require root access like
creating users and chown but students still don't experience actually
installing/administering their own OS.

-- 
Robert Arkiletian
Eric Hamber Secondary, Vancouver, Canada
Fl_TeacherTool http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/Fl_TeacherTool/
C++ GUI tutorial http://www3.telus.net/public/robark/