Re: K12 KLUG possibility: Demolinux possibilities

[Adam Tauno Williams <adam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> [reply to question of what do teachers in the middle school use
>>>computers for?]
>>>very little equipment for projection of a window onto a wall, etc. so I
>>>suspect little use is made of 'educational' software.   I'll find out.
>>If you need max-features Star Office is certainly a workable solution. 
>>If you need basic functionality and machines are older gnumeric/abiword 
>>is worth a look at this point.  I have played around with gnumeric and 
>>it has almost every feature of excel and works great.
>That has been my experience also.   IN fact, I was able to feed a text
>document in space-separated column form into a spreadsheet in gnumeric but
>not in StarOffice, which kept insisting on taking the input as text only.

Hmmm, I've had very good luck importing raw data files into StarOffice.  It's
import routing is very much like the one from older (pre-95) versions of excel. 
One trick is you have to use right-click/open-with and not just open or it just
pops it into the word processor.

[...snipped...]
>>Can you describe the architure of the school more completely?  Are the
>>machines networked? how powerful is the "server farm"?  What services to 
>>the servers provide?
>Except for a few stand-alone W95 machines in classrooms, all the computers
>in the highschool, the middleschool , and tghe elementaryh school are
>networked.  The primary network used is Novell.  There is a 3-disk RAID
>backup, UPS, multiple servers.  My wife for example when she uses MS word,
>downloads the program onto her harddrive for that session, saving her work
>on her partition of a server.  Said server(s) have partitions for groups,
>applications (word resides there), images, ...

Huh.  My Novell experience is very limited,  I took a LAN class that focused on
Novell and my thought was "this is one wierd package".  I think I'll stick to
that opnition.

>HELP!  Anyone out there familiar enough with hardware who can tell me what
>various beep patterns mean when turning on the computer??  I don't want
>to tell my wife that I destroyed her computer!

On one of my boxes long-beeps mean "I can't find no bloody OS".

>> What inter-service name space to they use (LDAP, NIS, NYS, NTdom,
>> etc...)?
>I believe the answer to this is Novell's netware. (is that in your list?)

No, all I've ever done with Netware is dispose of it.  Is this like old
straight-netware or netware+NDS?

>>What class of machines are the clients?
>Old slow pentiums with 16M RAM and 0.5 to 2 Gigabyte harddrives, an
>assortment of network cards, some with sound cards, fewer with CDROM
>drives.

Yikes!  Little chance of running WinY2k on them things.  What is the performance
of your network (10/100,flat/switched)?  If you've got a decent Linux box
sitting in a corner somewhere it might be worth trying to LTSP a few of these
(which you can do without effecting the contents of the local hard drive).  Take
a look at the LTSP presentation.

> Looking forward to your further sage advice,

Well it's usually compared to some type of weed,  so I suppose I'll accept
"sage".

Systems and Network Administrator
Morrison Industries
1825 Monroe Ave NW.
Grand Rapids, MI. 49505