Re: K12 KLUG possibility: Demolinux possibilities

["Ralph M. Deal" <deal@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 31 Aug 2000, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
 
> I take it he is an "IT" consultant?  Is he a NT guy, or does he have general
> UNIX experience (but not specifially Linux)?

He taught CS at the high school at Olivet before becoming the computer
tech there.  He left to form his own business as a consultant to school
systems but was called back when the former IT person quit.  He does not
know UNIX well.
> > [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.

> Abiword is currently quite a bit more spartan
> but for simple documents it works.  Inter-application integration is still a
> little off until the Bonobo components are more robust (very soon, gnumeric is
> already quite component-ized, abiword less so, at least as far as I can tell,
> documentation on the component system is rather lacking).  

Have not tried abiword yet but will do so.

> 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, ...

Today I spent several hours trying to use ghost to offload my wife's
harddrive, now too small, onto the image server partition, install a new
harddrive, then reload the image onto the new drive.  Steps 1 and 2 worked
but we were not able to use the ghost bootfloppy to boot the machine with
the new harddrive but got instead a steady beep for about 1/2 second, then
silence for aboujt 1/2 second before the pattern repeated.  Clearly some
hardware problem but we don't know what.

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!

> 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?)

> 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.

>  Answers to these questions
> really determine how easy it will be to do various things?
> 
> ***If some knows a URL where is says how to actually USE the gnumeric components
> from another app I would LOVE to know!!!
> 
> >There is one computer class in the middle school with a new teacher who is
> >learning with the students.  I'll work on him after he becomes more
> >comfortable in his new teaching assignment.


Looking forward to your further sage advice,

	Best,   Ralph  deal@kzoo.edu