CyberNerd

I recall that valve did some research a year or so back and concluded they could get their games running faster on Ubuntu/opengl than on windows. That was presumably done without all of the gaming centered kernel tweaks that they've done for steamos.

I'd recommend XBMC - with the artwork plugin XBMC

It's looking awesome:

because right now, regardless of whether there will be a crash, people they are making quite a bit of money from them. My colleague paid one or two dollars back in December and sold for £83 when I posted this thread. I appreciate you don't like them but it isn't all bad for everyone.

Mailmerge. That is something sheets could improve on. It does a good job of email mail merges, but I do have to tell staff to use libreoffice if they want a paper mail merge.

Teachers are usually quite vocal about things they need Indeed; like having to use the API to access users documents without things being shared with me, not being able to embed video other than URL's, The insanity of having to post to a domain restricted youtube channel needing a G+ account, the lack of table functionality in documents. ...but we don't get many complaints about spreadsheets COUNTIF isn't a new feature.

That is my backup plan that I'll propose to SLT. They'll soon cough up the annual EES monies to migrate back to MSOffice as soon as a teacher needs this feature. Unfortunately with four years of Google docs in school no one has yet asked me for it!. Back to the drawing board methinks.

I really miss the old days. The anticipation of downloading the latest Office ISO's, the time spent testing the newest version on various system builds, the tiny workarounds we needed to avoid conflicts. The big day of the roll out, the training sessions, the complains and invariably fixing the bits we missed. It made me feel valued. Now it's all done for me I just get that sinking feeling. Best I conjurer up a system failure that will give me that valued feeling again...

I don't do kits because I brew from grain. My friend does kits and his brews are pretty good. The quality of the kit is very important and these are worthy recommendations: Brupaks pride of Yorkshire range Almondbury old Scammondon Dark Colne Valley Bitter

Open-source metal 3-D printer - Appropedia: The sustainability wiki

There engineer emailed us it with the note that there is no timescale for a fix. e I would like to re-iterate that Lightspeed is a really good product that would suit the majority of schools. It's only if you have some quite specific setups that relying on a client becomes an issue.

Strange. your support system lists a defect which implies it isn't browser agnostic at all. Hence advice to choose a different browser. Apologies about the chromebook thing, I must have got the wrong end of the stick with that. I'll give Lightspeed another go in 3yrs time when some of the bugs are ironed out. For now I am back with smoothwall.

You need to enable G+ accounts for staff. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/157177

The specific problems with the clients are that they are broken. Light speed engineers told us in no uncertain terms that the Linux client doesn't work and that the thin client option is broken for certain browsers. They don't seem to have an option for chrome books and I certainly would not recommend this solution for a BYOD school unless you are being very specific about the type of machines students bring in. I would be very worried that a simple browser or iOS update would knock a number of machines offline. The non client transparent option is virtually unusable for example if you need to be able to log into an https site. Light speed is a superb system if you've got a bunch of regular windows or Mac workstation and it has some really awesome features. Don't hold your breath if you want it to work with all devices. Hence our move to WCCP.

This is the evaluation of Lightspeed vs Smoothwall that I sent to the senior leadership team: We are currently using a mixture of a commercial product called Smoothwall and an open source product called Dansguardian. The shortcomings that we have experienced with these systems are: speed, ease of use (for staff/students) and support. We looked at similar systems including Bloxx and Lightspeed. Bloxx is rather expensive and quite limited. We were impressed by Lightspeed as it fulfilled the shortcomings that we experience with smoothwall. We entered into a 4 week trial of lightspeed in mid November. During this trial we also spoke with other schools using lighspeed. Although we were impressed with many aspects of Lightspeed we found a design flaw: The system relies heavily on software that is installed on each laptop/telephone/PC/mac/tablet. The problem that this presents is that the company must keep the product updated for every version of laptop/telephone/PC/mac/tablet that we use. From experience of using the product we do not believe they are able to keep their product updated for multiple devices. We found significant issues with the software when using Citrix and the laptops in the Library (linux). We heard of further issues with ipads and we would expect more issues when manufacturers of tablets etc update their products. Following this experience we took another look at Smoothwall: The physical machines that we use for Smoothwall are due to be replaced and they do not cope well with the potential 1100 devices that we have in school. We are hopeful/confident that replacing these servers and using the latest version of Smoothwall will alleviate these problems. We had previously budgeted to do this. We have also investigated simplifying the process of staff/students using Smoothwall. We are now confident that we can use a system called Web Cache Configuration Protocol (WCCP). WCCP means that staff/students will not need to enter any proxy settings into their devices because the content filtering will be transparent. Although we are still concerned about the level of support we receive from smoothwall we have decided to continue using the system as we are confident that we can support it in-house. We have purchased a dedicated machine for this purpose and we intend on signing a three year contract in June 2014.

Where did you get that? It doesn't appear in our current version of the EULA 1.7.62196 it only mentions that you need a software license for each copy. It was promethean support that told me each piece of hardware comes with two explicit software licenses.

group::--- try: setfacl -R -m group::rwx /mount/msa1-enc2-fs2/documents/staff to set the default for all groups to read/write/excecute recursively on staff directory. You could of course fine tune that by doing: setfacl -R -m group:"groupname":rwx /mount/msa1-enc2-fs2/documents/staff Also - I'm not sure if you can use "domain users" with samba - you might want to check that.

What are your extended attributes on /mount/msa1-enc2-fs2/documents ? do getfacl /mount/msa1-enc2-fs2/documents and use setfacl to fix any permission problems.

Cisco Binary Game

Awesome, Thanks. I followed half of that; and decided to do a mix of the instruction above and also try and increase the size of the physical volume. It is a production machine so it was a bit nerve racking. Basically I deleted the partition using fdisk. Then recreated the partition. I then used pvresize and the I followed the procedure above. All worked out well. Disk has gone from 360GB to 1.4TB

Is it running SELinux? 9/10 problems I have which manifest as "permission denied" are usually SELinux (or ubuntu's equivalent)

It's been an awful long time since I've ever needed to extend disk space, could someone please help me with a procedure. I've added the disks to the SAN, and I've resized the LUN to +1TB The machine "sees" the extra disk space. Do I now need to increase the size of the physical volume (how?), then resize the logical volume, then resize the file system or am I supposed to add another physical volume, add the new PV to the volume group and then expand the logical volume and resize the file system. confused...

You do need an ERA license or an ERA+ license to share the resources electronically.

It's not quite that clear cut, because IF the DVD was recorded from terrestrial TV, it was correctly labelled at the time and you have an ERA+ license then it is perfectly legal to copy it for educational use. There are also cases I've come across where there is NO copyright on the DVD. It's better to weigh up each case individually.

It isn't always illegal, there are lots of DVD out of copyright or DVD's that don't have any immediate copyright issues such as those designed to be distributed in schools. You've got to check the actual DVD and be sure it is legal to redistribute copies before you do so.