Re: X-servers for Win & Mac Re: Introduction

[Bill Tihen <bill@tasis.ch>]

>For students at my school, forcing them to dial into get files would be 
>discriminatry as not all of them have a modem let alone a computer.
>This is not an option at least in the next 2 years as I can not see 100% 
>of them getting modems in that time frame.

Even if they all did have modems and computers at home.  There is still the
problem that someone has to pay for the phone lines.  They are much more
expensive than floppies.  I agree that mounting floppies is indeed a real
problem.
>
>The mounting of floppies is a real problem, and automounting them in 
>some way is ideally what I want to happen(as yet i haven't got a viable 
>choice for this).  The students need floppies so they can save their 
>WP8/Staroffice (i'll give them choice) work. Take them home and use them 
>on Word97 at home (The fact is that when I introduce this system 100% of 
>students will be using win3.1 or 95.
>
>I was planning to run a VNC daemon on a P450/256mb/4.3gbUWscsid machine 
>with all apps installed on that machine to serve my lab of 10-15 (can't 
>remember how many are broken down) win3.1 remote boot prom machines in 
>the maths/science lab.
>
>I would set up VNC so that it disconnected EVERY session, Also on this 
>network i'd use guest logins for now.

Tell me the trick.  How do you do this.

>
>ANother possibility would be to have two main computers, one dedicated 
>to running the VNC daemon, and another computer for running Xclients 
>(Applications) 

Sounds good.  I have never had access to some many servers.  But just out
of curriousity.  How do you have people logging into the VNC server and
then using apps on another -- do they then create an xwindow session from
there to the other server?  I just can't see this being bandwidth friendly
or pocket book friendly.  

I would also be careful using StarOffice -- also bloatware.  Each person
running it can use up to 30 MB of RAM easily!  

I would seriously consider using LyX as your word processor and save as rtf
or try out maxwell.  Its quite good -- not quite finished yet -- but one of
the best anyway.  Small footprint and very normal.  (although with large
files its RAM footprint grows signifigantly).  

I have Never tried Corel's product.  Is it good?
>
>
>I also need some type of Software for printing, where the kids goto the 
>staff room or library and pay 2 dollarsAUD for 20 printing credits. when 
>their credits run out their print job fails in some respect (hopefully 
>giving them some feedback ie Go purchase more credits from library or 
>staff room) If anyone knows about such software could they please tell 
>me about it.
>
I looked into this too.  This is difficult, but read the LJ article written
a month or 2 ago on printing.  They might have something for you if you
have no windows machines.