[K12OSN] Guide to enabling Local Apps support?

[Peter Scheie]

One point you may want to make in your presentation is that having a 'one 
architecture to fill all wants' is really expensive, and frankly rather 
wasteful. Viewing flash video is nice, but how much time each day/week/month do 
the kids actually spend doing that? Word processing, presentations, non-flash 
web browsing (e.g., flash isn't needed for reading Wikipedia), etc., probably 
consume a greater amount of kids' computer time in school, and on LTSP can be 
done so cheaply, both in software & hardware, that it is practical to put 
computers everywhere (put a lab in each classroom if you want).  IOW, Linux can 
provide what is needed 90% of the time at 10% of the cost; Windows eats 90% of 
the budget but only adds value 10% of the time.  Perhaps a small Windows lab is 
necessary for those edge cases, but the primary architecture should be LTSP.

Peter

Josh Fryman wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I've set up from the "K12Linux F10 Stable 4 x86-64" a fully working
> server.  I have several clients booting into it perfectly.  My clients
> are (right now) all i386 units.
> 
> The trick is that I want to enable local apps for Firefox + Flash to
> begin with, and a few other things later.
> 
> The documentation link on the K12LTSP site is broken; the Ubuntu
> documentation link is also broken; there are no mailing list posts
> that I can find that explain how to actually do this; and the only
> things that seem to mention it are LTSP 4.x based.  I find a lot of
> references to people saying they got parts working, but no actual
> guides.
> 
> As a bit of background, I'm a long-time Linux user (since mid 90's)
> but have never tried to set this up before.  My kids' school district
> is facing a massive budget cut (who isn't right now?) and are looking
> at any avenue to cut costs and save jobs.  The district's Microsoft
> license is due next year, and I've suggested that LTSP + OpenOffice +
> etc are a known viable replacement for their needs.
> 
> The only glitch I've found in my test setup, which I'm supposed to be
> demonstrating next week, is the really slow support for Flash videos
> and certain highly-interactive programs from the server-hosted
> Firefox.  Some of the material the schools present to kids is in Flash
> format from external sites, and it just crawls on my test setup with
> beefy server and quite powerful thin clients.  It sounds like the only
> solution is local app support for Firefox + flash, but . . . I cannot
> seem to find any explanation of how to actually configure it.
> 
> If there's a useful (and applicable) URL out there that I've just not
> found, or you can provide me with information on how to do this, I
> would be grateful.  I'm also willing to write the document that
> explains how to make this work, if someone can give me enough bits to
> get it going.
> 
> Thanks for your time,
> 
> Josh Fryman
> 
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