Re: [school-discuss] Further to rolling your own thin clients

[Daniel Howard <daniel@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks Paul!  The interesting part begins when we ask the city school 
administrators to convert their leased PCs into thin clients.    Maybe a 
typical story, but the company they leased the PCs from went out of 
business, and they now have a maintenance contract with another firm, which 
of course can't maintain all the PCs, which is why some of us parents have 
to go in and fix problems ourselves.

One interesting story that came out of my attempts to beat an old Win95 PC 
into submission: I wiped a Win95 PC clean that had a bloated registry and 
couldn't talk to the sound card and couldn't load IE, and when I tried to 
install Win98 from an original disk I had, the PC couldn't see the CD ROM 
drive.  Apparently the DOS drivers for CD ROM couldn't talk to the 
drive.  So, I made a bootable floppy disk of Linux and used that to boot up 
the PC and load the CD ROM support, then I copied the WIN98 folder from the 
Win98 install disk to the hard drive, rebooted in DOS (still not able to 
see the CD ROM drive) and installed Win98 on the system.  Then, it could 
see the CD ROM drive.  I had to use Linux in order to install Win98!

I bet everyone has a similar story of how Linux saved the day...

Best,
Daniel

At 09:57 AM 5/28/2005, you wrote:
> Hi Daniel,
>
> The maintenance/support issue is EXACTLY why K12LTSP was created. EVERY 
> school has this problem. Thin-clients that require no maintenance, no 
> support and no time to install is the only way for schools to provide 
> enough computers to students.
>
> It may take some time for everyone to figure this out. That's why I always 
> point out that K12LTSP was designed by teachers for use in schools.
>
> Good luck with your sample case. Do a write up and we'll post it on K12OS.org.
>
> ;-) Paul
>
> Daniel Howard wrote:
> > Well, it looks like we can buy certified LTSP thin clients that are only 
> > $70 USD more than the roll your own approach at diskless workstations:
> > http://www.disklessworkstations.com
> > although we thought getting the technically savvy parents involved in a 
> > NetDay type event to assemble and load them would be beneficial to 
> > getting the story out.  We'll still drag the parents in to help convert 
> > old PCs into thin clients...
> > Is there a hardware resource section of the schoolforge web site that I'm 
> > missing?  A review of new LTSP thin clients somewhere?  Should we add 
> > one?  In our case, we plan to use our elementary school's example and 
> > make a case to the city school system as a whole, which is going to be 
> > looking for new technology when a huge leased computer program expires in 
> > 2007.  The IT maintenance/support school-wide has been a major issue for 
> > many years now.
> > Regards,
> > Daniel
> >
> >
> > Daniel Howard
> > President and CEO
> > Quadrock Communications, Inc
> > 404.264.9123 main
> > 678.528.5839 fax
> > 404.625.1593 cell
>
>
> --
> ======================================================================
> Paul Nelson - Make things better.
> http://pnelson.us


Daniel Howard
President and CEO
Quadrock Communications, Inc
404.264.9123 main
678.528.5839 fax
404.625.1593 cell