[K12OSN] Plans for K12Linux EL6 and Future Fedora

[Les Mikesell]

On 5/11/11 6:18 PM, Warren Togami Jr. wrote:
> On 5/11/2011 1:07 PM, Jim Kinney wrote:
>>
>> Monthly power bills are always bad with old crap running. But to add in
>> getting new hardware (spend now + deploy in a few months) PLUS the bad
>> power bills is just not an option for most schools right now. What they
>> that does work is better than what they want that they can't afford to
>> buy without laying off another round of teachers.
>>
>> So we have to find a way to keep that old crap running for them a while
>> longer. So maybe a full release build that will run on i386, no upgraded
>> flags, with a minimal X environment is feasible. Dunno. I've never
>> compiled a full distro before. Maybe it' time I did.

The k12ltsp EL5 version should still work for old hardware as long as it is all 
old hardware where ltsp4 works.  CentOS 5 should have 3 more years of update 
support.

> Reconfiguring and rebuilding all the necessary packages might make it 1000%
> extra work, especially if you try to do so for package updates later, if you
> want to take advantage of bug fixes and driver improvements to improve client
> hardware support. This may be the infeasible part.

Would it be more feasible to use DRBL as the PXE boot manager and custom-tune 
some small linux distro (like Puppy) that it could boot from an iso image? 
That would divorce the server/client builds completely and perhaps offer a way 
to run different versions on different clients.  It wants to put the whole image 
in RAM on the client so it might be an exercise in trimming out all unneeded 
programs.  On the plus side you might be able to build a USB or CD boot, NX 
client version of the same image that would be perfect for wifi clients without 
much extra effort.

-- 
    Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com