[school-discuss] Re: Report: Experiences with Centralised operated Skolelinux installations

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Søndag 16 april 2006 03:59, skrev Steve Hargadon:
> Fascinating report.  I found it difficult to understand the different
> types of client technologies being used.  

People generally don't know about the different client types, and get
lured into using client technology that could be 3 times more
expensive with less functionality than other solutions. E.g in Norway
people that work for the government, that are paid of our tax money
recommend using graphical terminals as a sort of thin client (Citrix,
FreeNX, rdp, rdesktop etc.).  They dismiss using real thin client with
LTSP and they don't know about diskless workstations (half thick
clients).

The thing this people don't tell is the lack of multimedia support
with graphical terminals when using centralised servers, or the
expenses using local servers. They also dismiss using standard
workstations with Linux, Windows, Mac and diskless workstations with
Skolelinux that really support multimedia. Also thin clients support
multimedia to a certain extent, and the thin client solution is cost
efficient compared to e.g graphical terminals (Citrix or FreeNX).

The experiences from 5 municipalities in Norway with enterprises wide
deployment and maintenance shows that the client technology hugely
affect the cost of maintaining the systems, the functionality the
users get, and where to place the equipment. Where to place the
hardware depending on the bandwidth to the schools when doing
centralised management of the systems if the schools want multimedia
support.

When a Skolelinux system is deployed in a small scale you don't see
this issues. When deploying the solution in 2 or 500 schools the issue
about client technology really hits the budget.

> I set up SkoleLinux the other night in my garage, and found the
> English documentation blank in the areas of thin client setup for
> the server.

That's a good starting point for getting some technical experience
with the system. The Skolelinux effort is done to make it really easy
to deploy municipality wide installations with a huge amount of
clients and many servers, but also do a small installation in a
classroom with 10 client's and one server. This book explains hot to
get started:

http://developer.skolelinux.no/~klaus/newnotater_Sarge/

Since there are much more activity deploying Skolelinux/DebianEdu in
non English speaking arias in the world, the English web-site is not
up to date in certain arias. And we need more people to work on
that. The Norwegian, German, Greece, and French sites are more
documents. But luckily we have translated the installing and
maintaining book into English:

There is also a wiki with lot of documentation. 
http://wiki.debian.org/DebianEdu

This documentations shows that we are working on doing the English
language more accessible fore schools.

> However, I loved the single CD concept.

A lot of technical people don't really understand the importance
reducing the number of software packages that's installed with a
default GNU/Linux distro when used in a schools. The report from the
schools is that they needed to reduce the 300 programs they got
installed on a standard distro. 50-80 programs in all was more than
sufficient.

> Just feedback.

Thanks

I hope the documentation in the links above could be useful?

- Knut Yrvin