Re: [school-discuss] Knoppix vs. Freeduc vs. ???

[Jan Wilson <corocom@btl.net>]

* Dave Prentice <prentice@instruction.com> [030528 17:01]:
> A sudden opportunity has arisen to donate 20 old Pentium computers
> to an orphanage in Guatemala. (Free shipping - praise the Lord!) They
> are doing great work, having gotten over 500 kids off the streets and
> into schooling, some for the first time in their lives.

That sounds great!

> I need to load an OS on these machines for very basic use in
> computer literacy at the orphanage's school. There have been
> discussions on the list about both Knoppix and Freeduc, but I have no
> experience with either. (I've used RH for several years.)

Knoppix is very impressive.  I haven't used Freeduc, but I understand
it is identical to Knoppix except that quite a few applications have
been replaced by ones that are more appropriate to an educational
setting, including stuff like TuxTyping.

> It is my impression that they will both run from CD, but it would be
> nice if they could go on the hard drives for faster response.

Maybe.  At any rate, if there is a swap partition (Linux) or swap file
(Windows) on the hard drive, Knoppix will use it ... this may be
critical if there isn't enough RAM ... it will be SLOOOOOW, though.

> Which is less demanding of resources? That is, what's the minimum
> size hard drive and minimum amount of memory to get reasonable
> performance? Also, does either or both offer the option for Spanish?

Minimum hard drive size is about 2 GB, I believe.  Minimum RAM depends
on what you want to run.  A lite window manager like IceWM will run in
about 64 MB, but for KDE and OpenOffice you should have at least 128
MB.  The RAM is likely to be the limiting factor for old Pentiums.

Another possibility would be one server with LTSP and then the old
computers would work with about 32 MB of RAM.


-- 
Jan Wilson, SysAdmin     _/*];          corocom@btl.net
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