[seul-edu] Re: In service update

[Michael Shigorin <mike@lic145.kiev.ua>]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:26:51AM -0500, Jim Thomas wrote:
> StarOffice was very slow.  Until the in-service, I had never actually
> sat down and tried to USE SO5.2 on *those* particular machines.  It was
It was _the_ mistake -- it's too easy to get burned that way :-(
Personally, I wouldn't run OpenOffice on 32M either -- it's not
the best racer on Cel333/64, too (sloooow start, then OK).

> machines are mostly 133MHz 586's with 32M ram.  I'm thinking we'll need
> to spend some cash on a manly server and run these machines as Xterms
You can even take 16M off each to exchange for server parts, or
to split memory 16-to-64 between X-terms and "standalone"
workstations.

> Kalcul problems.  For some reason, when kalcul started a new game, it
> one out.  It works on my PC!
Distros?

> The highlight (for me) was when - 15 minutes into the demo - one of the
> teachers remarked "Oh!  This isn't Windows!"  I guess that's a testament
> as to the useability of KDE.
On P133/32?  You gotta be kidding :-(  Try lighter environments
as icewm, windowmaker and blackbox; people may not feel "this is
windows", but net usability of these is surprisingly high.  You
could pair them with dfm (or gmc if you're into it ;-) to get
some kind of fast desktop.

> The teachers were all impressed with the capabilities of the system. 
> They especially liked that the students could not alter the system's
> settings (like they do on the handfull of Windows PC's in their
> classrooms).  They also like the accountability that a real login
> facility provides.
And if you get accounts centralized (and hand them over from
NIS/NFS server), your colleagues and pupils can move freely from
system to system without any hassle of "where are my files made
that day... of, I don't even have an account here"!

I want to implement kind of that in liceum I've graduated from
(http://lic145.kiev.ua, in Russian/Ukrainian).

> No one was upset that we weren't running Windows.
Great.

> Not all the students in the school have accounts on the system, and I
And you could come up with some quantity of "shared accounts" for
less inclined to perform less labor.  But get ready -- they'll
come back! ;-)

> has a .netscape directory with pre-configured preferences.js and
BTW, did you evaluate Skipstone and Galeon as browsers of choice?
They have far superior rendering engine (Mozilla's gecko) to bad
old NN4's one...

And one more tip -- it's useful to create some kind of
administrative account (say, "admin" ;) preloaded with
~admin/.ssh/{known_hosts2,authorized_keys2} (optionally with
passwordless sudo capability) to be able to perform some
operations remotely and scriptably if you plan to clone systems
by means of dd'ing HD-to-HD.

This has helped me a lot in 40-head computer club setup.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@altlinux.ru>
  ------ http://visa.chem.univ.kiev.ua/~mike/

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