openhgs

LOL! I've first started supporting SCO/Unix desktops in 1991. I installed my first Linux desktop machines in 1996, and this was for a large food manufacturer. I've been working in IT since 1980 and I've rarely used M$ on the desktop - I've been extremely priviledged .

The admin people use Windows obviously as CMIS doesn't run on Linux; more's the pity. The schools' MIS system should be platform independent, Our admin machines are separate from the Curriculum machines. All of our documentation is stored offsite and is publically accessible - that is our policy. If our documentation is of use to anyone they are welcome to use it. There is no harm in publishing local i/p addresses; it's about as dangerous as you telling me the host name of your server. Didn't you realise 10.0.0.0/8 is reserved for private networks?

Our curriculum network is Linux and there are many advantages. No viruses, proper security, proper file sharing, higher performance, etc, etc. All the usual reasons that have been trotted out many times before. We have no compatibility issues; we give each pupil a custom copy of the OpenCD which contains the same programs as they use at school. If they choose not to use it, and they cannot access files that they have created at home, that's their problem. The only disadvantage is one of perception, the old "it can't be any good it's not Microsoft". Microsoft only exists for one reason, that is to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. Linux exists for the good of humanity. I found an interesting news item today. Britain's leading optician, Specsavers, has migrated from Windows to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in all its 830 stores. To quote from the story " Although Specsavers won't go into details, online discussion has reported that Vista played a large part in the company's move. While sympathetic to Linux, the company had been wary of the retraining costs involved in moving to a new operating system. Thanks to Vista, the company reckoned it would pay those costs whether or not it stayed with Microsoft, so the move to Linux became less of a jump." Specsavers have branches in Ireland, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Spain and wholesale business in Australia and Hong Kong, so the effects of this move is major.

Remember all second hand kit was the latest once. If you aren't of the mentality of "we must always have new toys", your hardware can run until it physically fails - I'm posting this from an ancient Toshiba 486 laptop which is still running fine and in semi-regular use.

We too were runnng on a split server. On the split server the Apcahe Tomcat daemon would run but eportal would often be unavailable as it would lose communication with the sql database. Restarting eportal related servers on both machines would resolve the issue. We now run on a single server and eportal runs under IIS. On this server IIS crashes regularly and so again Eportal is not available. Strangley however Eportal as served by Apache Tomcat is much more reliable than it was on the split server. Those users "in the know" access via Tomcat. Monitoring our server has shown than if more that one user attempts to access Eportal at a time, the various daemons are likely to crash. Eportal is very resource hungry. Get the beefiest box you can (preferably something like a Cray XMP ) and the fastest network available and your eportal setup might be OK.

Three reasons. Firstly, we're an LTSP site and the nice people at Riverdale built the LTSP right into Fedora. I've lazy, like all good system admins - I do not believe in reinventing the wheel. Secondly familiarity. I know were almost everything lives in Redhat/Fedora so I don't have to hunt. Thirdly, I consider it to be the "best" distro and the easiest to configure. I first installed Redhat 5 back in 1996 and I've tried pretty well all of the other distros over the years and I keep going back to Redhat. Like the slogan says "if you're on a good thing, stick to it". Finally, schools should be encouraging a corporate view of the world. When the students get out there in the real world, they might well find themselves in a very strict working environment. I've worked for places that did not allow you to customise your PC in anyway other than selecting from a supplied group of wallpapers and running an approved screen saver. It's no use saying "I like IE" when the company standard is Firefox.

Marketting "..Jobs reckons that allowing Windows users to download the browser will help boost market share the same way that making iTunes available for Windows users helped that application." Also, Safari 3 is the key to allowing application developers to create third-party applications for the hotly anticipated iPhone; developers can create web applications using Web 2.0 standards such as Ajax that will work just as well as applications that Apple has written natively for the iPhone. Mickeysoft are just as guilty. How long did IE users have to wait for tabbed browsing, integrated popup blocker and RSS feed reader? Other browers have had these features for years. AFAIK IE cannot enlarge the text on a website but leave the images original size - Opera can. Multiple desktops and multple virtual consoles are but a pipe dream.

You can come and see our LTSP solution if you want. Ask yourself a question. Do you really need to authenticate against AD? We used to authenticate against PDC but there was no real reason to do so, other than having existing users. All new users were being created on and authenticating against the Linux NIS/NFS server. Originally, we were going to let the PDC users die as they left the school. A couple of years ago we decided to convert all existing Windows users to Linux, so we copied all their files over, setup identical user ids and ran a password cracker to preserve their passwords. Of the 600 odd users involved, there were 10 we couldn't crack. It was a very happy day when we disconnected PDC. It was also quite fortuitous as a few weeks after we completed the conversion it blew up. The KDE kiosk lets you lock down the users very tightly and quickly.

I recommend a thin client solution such as LTSP rather than stand alone machines. It is far easier to administer one or two servers than a bunch of boxes. Authentication to a window domain is very easy. Wireless is not so easy but possible. In my experience getting the wireless card itself working is the biggest problem, especially in laptops. http://www.linuxmint.com might be a quick solution in this regard. You can run IE under Wine or Cross-Over without any problems, although personally I would ditch anything that is browser centric.

We have two HP Business Inkjet 2300 which works perfectly. We've used to have an HP 2000C which worked perfectly and I think was a better printer. At home I use an Epson Stylus Colour C86 which also works perfectly but the the printer is a piece of junk. The only gotcha that I know of with colour printing is that under some versions of Redhat the ps file that the CUPS uses for it's test print has an error in the postscript code. When it prints, it can lead you to believe that your printer isn't working properly when in reality it probably is.

I'm not that impressed with the Neovo E17s - out of 30, 6 have had to go back to the manufacturer for repair in the last 2 years. The display goes very wonky, but not in a consistent way. A couple had displayed the same was when a CRT monitor drops an electron gun, and the rest all manor of odd displays. We also have about 130 GNR TG705Ds (again 17"). The ones used by staff have been fine, but we've had 4 of the 90 the pupils use catch fire (nothing major just smoke pouring from the back). Again all repaired under warranty. They've been great monitors at a very good price and we will be getting more of these.

A very sensible suggestion. Simple to implement too.

I did ours yesterday and just as I'd finished, the LEA called to say don't bother installing it as there is a new version out on Wednesday. Our users are not best pleased.

We use Fedora here. I've tried pretty well all of the distros but I keep going back to Redhat derivatives; I first installed Redhat 5x back in 1996. My next personnel install wil be Linux From Scratch.

Welcome aboard! The Linux Documentation Project is always a good place to start when looking for info. Seek "The Linux System Administrators' Guide" on this site. RUTE is also a good reference. Subscribe to the appropriate Google Group for your distro (assuming your LEA allows access to Google Groups). Buy a handful of O'Reilly Books and be sure to check their Open Books page. Finally ask specific questions and answers will be given.

Before they put the "safe search" code in place, they allowed access to .com and .uk images, but .fr, .com.au etc images were blocked. Go figure! Also anyone with any intelligence knows how to perform an unfiltered image search using google if they want to, so I think their filtering isn't all that effective.

Where does the BNP intend to put them then? As long as the place is closed down, we don't care where they residents go. We are all NIMBYists. Ideally to a new facility in Downing Street but I don't Mr Blair would allow it.

Indeed! Where I live, only the BNP has supported the cause to get a half way house for sex offenders closed down. This is the most important local issue. The sitting Labour candidate has said we can't do anything about it as it comes under the Home Office, the Liberal candidate has been very quiet on the issue and I think the Lib Dem bod said that they have to live somewhere. This is a moral dilema; do I vote for the BNP and be called a scum bag, or do I not vote and be called apathetic? Maybe I'll add a new candidate to the paper and vote for them.

If you use a separate VCR and DVD recorder, then it doesn't matter if the picture breaks up due to a dodgy tape; the DVD recorder will keep chugging away. I recommend a recorder with a hard disk. A video filter such as ICOS Technology MacroMaster Gold, which sits between the two machines is a worthwhile investment. In my opionion, converting to some computer file format (eg mpeg) isn't worth the hassle. DVDs take up almost no space.

A quick google says http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/General_Live_Diskless and yes it is Knoppix based.

We've almost finished installing ours and we did a little practice session today with some of the pupils. I think we are supposed to be running live in two weeks. The delay is nothing to do with us.

Some of us need to use 800x600 otherwise we can't read whats on our screens.

The webmail used to work perfectly in Opera and Firefox, but not at all in Konqueror. Following the recent change, it works fine in Konqueror and Firefox but not in Opera. I use a mail client and avoid these problems...

If you install on Fedora there are some issues that you will need to resolve. The links in /usr/share/applications point to /etc/openoffice.org2.2 but the software is installed in /opt/openoffice.org2.2. Similarly the two scripts /usr/bin/openoffice.org2.2 and /usr/bin/openoffice.org2.2-printeradmin point to reference /etc rather than /opt.

We are banned from accessing the site here in Birmingham. Access via the BGFL returns " Inappropriate Content Blocked by: Smartfilter/Sexual Materials (sm)" We are ahem NAC-kered!