Re: [seul-edu] Re: [novalug] Re: FETC - technology and education --FLALUGS #3

[Dave Prentice <dprentice@uno.edu>]

Gail wrote:
>Josh,
>  I am a teacher at a middle school in Fargo, ND.  We have just
>installed Caldera2.4 on 30 PC's in our new lab.  I have a few
>questions about Linux in general.  Our superintendent chose the lab
>because it was less expensive than a Windows or Mac lab.
>2. We are using StarOffice 5.2.  Does it always take 15 to 20 seconds
>to load?  Our Netscape also takes 10-15 seconds to load?  Are we doing
>something wrong or is this normal for Linux?

Besides the amount of memory on the server (the more the better), are you
running from each machine's hard drive or over a network? If a network, 10mb
or 100mb? With 30 machines loading at a time, 10mb might take a while. It
will be better if you start them up at staggered intervals. Even so, 100mb
would probably speed things up a lot.
    In my classroom with 90 mhz Pentiums, each one does take about that long
to load Netscape off the hard drives.

>4. We loaded StarOffice5.2 at the root level.  We reloaded it for a
>student access account.  Does it need to be reloaded 230 times?  Once
>for each students personal account?  That is the information that we
>received from our technical support.

    If StarOffice works anything like WordPerfect, you should have a special
partition on your server capable of exporting via NFS as read-only. (I use
/opt on my server, a slowpoke 486.) Install the application on that
partition, make sure it's being exported (use Linuxconf), then go to each of
the clients and use Linuxconf to make them mount the directory on bootup. On
mine, each of them mounts teacher:/opt on their own /opt directory. Then log
in on each client as root and start Xwindows. Go into whatever menu editor
you have (via the system or settings submenu - I'm not sure on Caldera) and
add the application as a new item, new application, or whatever. In order to
access it over your network, you will need to give it the path
/opt:/whatever_you_called_the_directory/name_of_the_executable_file. Once
it's added to each machine's menu as root, you can log out and any other
user should be able to log in and access it from their menu.

>7.  I am a classroom teacher.  My goal is to be proficient in software
>run on Linux.  I want to learn how to troubleshoot.  I do not
>currently have the energy or the interest to get in to the heart of
>Linux commands.  Are there workshops or materials that can meet my
>needs?
    Besides books, stay close to SEUL. I'm a classroom teacher new at this
too and have found that the members are always willing to help.

>9.  Is Linux really ready for schools?  Is it user friendly for the
>average teacher to bring a class to the lab and enhance her
>curriculum.
>Gail
    If nothing else, there are great web sites with hands-on tutorials on
almost any educational topic you can think of. Linux lets you monitor and
control what your students get into online much more closely than Windows.

Dave Prentice
prentice@instruction.com