[K12OSN] Scenario Distributions

Jason Leydon (jleydon@morriscatholic.com)
Sun, 02 Jun 2002 18:51:39 -0400 

Well I gave a shot at setting up K12LTFS this past weekend and ran into 
a few minor hardware conflictions (nothing major) needless to say I got 
it up and running with 2 clients without much of a problem.

(Just testing out right now).

Great default setup thus far, however, I was curious if anybody has put 
out their own custom distribution.  I simply think it would be nice to 
see a few different types of distro's released depending on a certain 
school's scenario for examples as well as easily setting things up from 
scratch.  I would be more than happy to do this myself (although I do 
not have the best administration knowledge when it comes to Linux), it 
will just take a bit of learning.  Reason being, I want to setup a 
version of K12LTFS that is a bit more "strict".

My general plan is to setup first, a lab in our library where it will be 
open to all students in our school (Morris Catholic High School which is 
a Private Christian High School grades 9-12 in New Jersey) can go into 
the Library and surf the net for school work as well as use OpenOffice 
for reports and such.  What I have been doing is only installing Gnome 
as well as only the Mozilla 1.0 RC 3 internet Browser (I found that if I 
put too many applications it confuses people and this is good when it is 
a computer someone will use daily but I do not want students fooling 
around with all the software on a computer).  Also, I am working on 
getting our grades setup online so that our faculty can type in grades / 
attendance and such and this is being restricted so they can only input 
this information in the Library under their user name (restricted by IP 
address due to the fact that I can see a password being given away to a 
student somehow and if grades are changed by a student I am to blame).  

This will most likely be done using 1 server and under 10 clients or 
perhaps even 20 clients with 2 servers (depending on specs of the 
servers).  The second scenario I plan to setup is for our Music Department.

We have courses that are expanding where the students in our Music 
department are going to be studying a lot of history of music etc.... 
where the Internet would be a great tool to have in the Music room as 
well as being able to have applications that are related to this. 
 (Generally I will simply have different suites of music for each lab 
that this is setup in).

The next major thing which I could really use input on (hopefully 
someone has done something similar) is redoing our programming computer 
class lab.  They currently have approximately 20 computers and teach 
Basic, C/C++, and Java.  They currently are using Windows 98 for this 
class and it would be a dream come true if I can get a distro setup that 
has the proper compilers that would be familiar to things they are 
currently using for the course (compiler is a compiler if you ask me 
though).  Students in this class tend to abuse the computers quite a bit 
since they fool around a lot and I cannot restrict them too much since 
they need to execute a lot of software in this course that they are 
compiling.  Setting it up as a Terminal Client/Server would help where 
they can execute anything (i hope) and not be able to change anything 
that would screw up the computers (it is currently a nightmare to 
administrate the class).

Any help is truely appreciated!

Jason Leydon
jleydon@morriscatholic.com
Director of Technology
Morris Catholic High School
http://www.morriscatholic.com




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