Re: [seul-edu] Distro Dementia

[Harry McGregor <micros@azstarnet.com>]

On Wed, 28 Nov 2001, Doug Loss wrote:

> Les Richardson wrote:
>
> > I have heard some talk about making an educational only distribution.  I
> > assume that we're not talking about a "real distro" in the sense that we do
> > hardware detection, etc. but rather an application only CD that can run "on
> > top of" various popular distro's (and hopefully most of them with only
> > minor changes. (i.e. libraries issues,etc.))
>
> There seem to be two differing schools of thought on this.  Roger and I seem to
> be going with your "but rather" concept, while Jim Thomas and some others (I
> don't remember just who at the moment) seem to be talking more of a full-blown
> distro.

Well Doug, I am 100% in the addon camp.  The logistics of doing a distro,
plus the trying to please everyone at once aspects of it set it upto fail.

Just for example would it be .deb based or .rpm?  If it's .rpm, anyone
familiar with debian would avoid it, if it' .deb based, the same thing
hold true for the redhad/mandrake/suse/etc fans.  Also you have to judge
who is installing and maintaining the system.  I firmly belive that a
linuxbased system without a proper system admin (at the least at the
district level) is probably about as insecure as windows.  The reason
Linux is generaly more secure is that you don't have as many micky mouse
Linux/Unix admins as you do NT/2000 admins.  I have several students who
work for Microsoft (level 3 tech support), and they got hit hard on the
phones with Nimda...  The patch for the main problems in IIS had been out
for over 11 months when Nimda hit...  They were getting calls from fortune
500 companies that had their exchange servers wiped out totally by it, due
to not installing the security updates.

Havings a clear, organized set of packages for education would be great,
but each environment is differnt, any decent system admin, once they find
the setup that works well for them, should be able to duplicate it
(kickstart, a preset group of packages under debian, etc) on any number of
systems without much hastle.  I personaly don't want to see the CS teacher
for a high school that barley knows anything about windows or networking
(now this is a generalization, many of them could do this just fine) being
able to drop a cd in the drive, and think they are done with the labsetup.
Security updates are a major issue, and need to be examined.

The local school district here in Tucson just installed  a SINGLE
firewall, for the entire district, and they think it will keep their
network secure.  Unfortunatly high school students can drop their laptops
onto the network very easily (though they could get expelled if cought),
and the admin and student networks are note firewalled at the school
(seperate networks meeting at the router, but the router will happly pass
anything between them).  The inside is not secure, thus the firewall does
limited good.  Now imagine if you had a lab full of powerful linux
stations, that were root exploitable....  Major problems.

I hate to try and discurage people on this, but you don't want to try and
make it idiot proof to setup, because 6 months later it will require some
knowlege to keep running.  Education is what is needed, with that, the
teacher/system admin/ whoever can actualy setup and custoomise with a
knowen distrubtion, and then add the educational addons.  Eventaly a lot
of the packages will get picked up by the distro vendors (heck tux typing
is part of debian already).

		Harry

> --
> Doug Loss                 Always do right.  This
> Data Network Coordinator  will gratify some people
> Bloomsburg University     and astonish the rest.
> dloss@bloomu.edu                Mark Twain
>
>

--
Harry McGregor, CEO, Co-Founder
Hmcgregor@osef.org, (520) 661-7875 (CELL)
Open Source Education Foundation, http://www.osef.org