Re: [school-discuss] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

[Knut Yrvin <knuty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Søndag 21 mai 2006 18:58, skrev Rich Goodwin:
> 1) Determine if the systems are the same or not
> 2) If they are the same - CPU, RAM, devices ... then load the distro

Experiences with large municipality wide installations at all schools in 
Norway shows that you can handle i huge variety of different client 
hardware on the clients. So It's no demand for identical hardware. The 
reason for this is that the thin client support, the diskless workstations 
and standard workstations recognises all the hardware. 

That situation has been a fact since 2004, after years of developing the 
auto detecting of hardware that now is standard in Debian, Skolelinux, 
Edubuntu and others Debian derivatives. The auto detection is also the fact 
for older laptops, when used as workstations. 

But if you continues using an older version of Windows, you should have 
identical machines to prevent to handle to many diskimages when maintaining 
software installed on every PC. If you have 4-5 different machines with 
different CPU, disk, RAM you have a lot to do. 

With Debian based distributions apt-get handles the software upgrades on the 
huge variety of hardware. 

In short. Things has changed the last 5 years :)

Paper that sums up the experiences using Skolelinux in municipality wide 
installations at all the schools (pdf): 
http://developer.skolelinux.no/artikler/2006-04-02-debconf6.pdf

A presentation from debconf 6:
http://developer.skolelinux.no/info/prosjektet/debconf6.odp

Thanks

Knut Yrvin