danbuntu

have you seen this: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ActiveDirectoryWinbindHowto

I'm looking forward to one of these as they tend to want to remote into the machine to 'fix'. I'll just boot up a vm and watch and laugh as they try to find their way around Linux and convince me they are doing something useful

PM me and I'm sure we can sort something out - although we are a college not a primary school

We use Moodle and have good buy in from a most of the staff. This is helped a lot by an excellent e-learning manager/coach. We're keen to keep developing it and getting feedback form staff on possible improvements. We've also recently implemented the ILP module which has replaced plan-it. This means that each students has their own learning plan. The plan also includes a whole heap of information from our MIS system and so provides an excellent one stop shop for information. I very much doubt we would have had the flexibility to do this with anything other than moodle.

'get lamp' is good for a laugh 'also steal this film' is interesting

Or you could let them know about the creative commons licensing options and point them to sites like Jamendo and Free Music Archive Additionally if they know about CC they can use that to search Flicker and a whole load of other resources with out the need to sign up

you can use stuff from jamendo.com as it's all CC licensed

one approach to this is to use a metacourse. so say to you have biology 1,2 and 3 you'd then have a 4th course and assign the other three to it. All members of the first 3 would have access to the forth and have a gradebook in it. Take a look the docs on moodle.org for more information

We have piwik installed. You put a piece of code into your website and it's merrily collects and graphs a whole raft of stats onto a nice dashboard. Whilst this won't help you now it's well worth looking at and installing for later

Only do esxi if you're going to be running other vms on the box as well otherwise you're just adding another layer of stuff to go wrong. But you'll find unbuntu will run on most things. If in doubt ask on the ubuntu forums

Adito seems to have been renamed to OpenVPN ALS and still seems to be stalled

is ssl explorer still available? I thought they had been bought out by Baracuda. Both the community version and the open source fork both seems dead on sourceforge

It's worth noting that as well as Malta at the top of this post the governments of Brazil, India and China and Korea plus regional governments in Spain, Portugal and probably some other are increasingly using OSS. Also the White House runs it's main website on OSS. So at the very least our government needs to look at this stuff.

Valid points. However what if government takes my taxes and spends them working with and developing open source software. Then when I, as part of a smaller organisation, come to use that software it would have had the benefit of all that extra development and hopefully as a result be more stable and easier to set up. Also there is nothing to stop you paying for someone to help setup open source software for you and nothing wrong with it either. The advantage of course is that when you have had time to use it and play with it you can go solo and run it by yourself - something you can't do with proprietary software.

The linux action show had a good take on this which is that opinion is beginning to change as the second and third generation of geeks are beginning to work their way up the corporate ladder - the kind of geeks that don't default to we have paid for it therefore it's better.

Hell yes.

Have you looked at elgg or mahara? you could also do some of this with Moodle or indeed Organic groups on Drupal or Community Manager under Joomla. Might be easier then reinventing the wheel

>Storing the files in a directory with a unique name is easy enough to do, but i was >hoping to use this method instead, unless someone can come up with some real >reasons why i shouldnt? Just have a Google around - you'll find this is general considered bad practice except for very small images: To BLOB or Not To BLOB: Large Object Storage in a Database or a Filesystem - Microsoft Research. >If your worried about database overhead, any statements referring to the picture will >NOT use "SELECT *" and all my tables are indexed properly for speed. What about overheads in terms of database backup? Storing things as blob will make the DB bigger and so increase the time to backup and increase storage demands for backups. Even more so when often things like pictures don't actually change that often. So you could just rsynch the picture directory of elsewhere for backup. Granted it does make backups easier going the blob route but at the detriment of everything else. >also prevents any linkage problems if files are moved. This shouldn't be a problem as you'll have a config file that declares a variable with the link path. If you change paths you edit that one variable and you're good to go again.

Best advice is don't store the pic as a blob. Store the name of the pic and then link to it; Normal image storing or mySQL blob? - Stack Overflow

That's true but there is a slightly different approach that can be used. The thinstation system can provide a minimal working desktop with a web browser. Potentially by moving to google apps or live@edu this could be all an end user requires as all their email, word processing etc can be accessed and edited via the web browser (students after all are mainly in the information worker category). You then have the option of booting into a vdi or vapp when needed for say photoshop or those people that must have ms office fr mail merges or similar. This would mean that you would need less load on the virtual side of things and some less servers and less licenses for the vms. Because thinstation is linux based there is no need to worry about viruses and upgrades or repairs is a simple case of swap the cf card.

does anyone have experience with something like thinstation? The way I see it you could take a CF card and an ide to CF convertor. rip out the hard drives from current kit and replace them with a cf card with a copy of thinstation on. instant low cost thin client, although perhaps not as energy efficient a as 'real' thin client

looks like they are building in some kind of apt system for updates and programs though. That could be kind.

if your behind an ISA proxy you will need to install ntlmaps or similar

or mysql workbench

Moodle! and then possibly Mahara at a later stage. But defiantly Moodle. if moneys that tight think about google apps and maybe linux desktops as well