Re: [seul-edu] Re: In service update

[Jim Thomas <jthomas@leesburg.bittware.com>]

Michael Shigorin wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 15, 2002 at 11:26:51AM -0500, Jim Thomas wrote:
> > Kalcul problems.  For some reason, when kalcul started a new game, it
> > one out.  It works on my PC!
> Distros?

RH6.2.  I was at the school yesterday and tried kalcul on the server -
and it worked - but it still has that problem on the student
workstations.  

> 
> > 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.

We're still using KDE 1.1 which performs pretty well on those machines. 
I looked at upgrading to KDE 2.x last summer, but the performance went
down the tubes - WAY down (two minute logins, 15 seconds between icon
click and application launch, etc).  So I backed it out.  I've heard the
lastest KDE has sped things up quite a bit, so I might try again over
the summer.  If it's not good enough, I'll certainly look into icewm.

> 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"!

Yes, we're doing that already.  I intend to add samba to the mix soon so
that user accounts are available on the handful of Windows boxen too. 
But I think I want to upgrade the server first.  

The other thing I'm looking at is switching our webfilter (squidguard)
so that it authenticates by user id instead of by ip address.  I believe
that way I can get accountability even on the windows boxen (once samba
is running).  I was always worried that a user could just add a new
account to a windows box (everyone's root on Windows!) and surf
anonymously, but if the web filter is authenticating by user, it will be
easy to deny unknown users.

> > 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! ;-)

I definitely want to steer away from shared accounts.  That's the same
as an anonymous account, and will lend itself to abuse.  The students
have already caught on that when they surf inappropriately on a linux
box that it comes right back to them, but on the Windows machines we can
only narrow it down to a half-dozen kids.

> 
> > 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...

That's something to consider.  I've been experimenting with mozilla at
work, but it crashed on me a couple of times so I gave up.  Looking
back, I think I'll give it another shot, because NS does the same thing
- I've just learned which sequences cause it to crash and have learned
to avoid them.

I'll look into Galeon and Skipstone too, thanks for the heads-up!

-- 
Jim Thomas      **    Principal Applications Engineer ** Bittware, Inc
703.779.7770    **    jthomas@bittware.com **  http://www.bittware.com
The secret to enjoying your job is to have a hobby that is even worse.
 - Calvin's dad