[Tbox-talk] Tbox for public computer lab
Status: Inactive
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From: epsas <ep...@li...> - 2002-10-25 21:48:09
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Aloha, I am considering using Telemetry Box for a public computer lab I am bottom-lining for the student community at the University of Hawai`i. I am currently using Redhat 8.0 as the base operating system on these machines. In short, I am wondering if: - A tbox live CD would be capable of providing X11 plus a Gnome2 desktop environment for a homogenous set of workstations? [The workstations authenticate over NIS (or LDAP) and NFS mount their /home directory. Our workstations are PIII-700Mhz with 128MB of RAM] - With UPM, is it possible to build a local binary repository (ala an apt source) and perform network installations with custom compiled packages? Thanks, Charles Paul (epsas) Background on our Lab: Gentoo Linux was used in an earlier configuration - but a decision was made to move away from Gentoo for a couple of reasons: o Part of our lab's mandate is to teach University and High School student volunteers how to install and maintain Unix machines. The 'fastest' installation procedure for Gentoo I found involves dd'ing a bzip2 compressed image of the raw block device over ssh (we have a homogenous network of P-IIIs). While this method may be less time-consuming than a redhat kickstart, I felt this was not a suitable introduction to GNU/Linux installations for newbies. o "Bootstrapping" Gentoo + X11 + Gnome2 + Gimp is time consuming - we did not want to run SysAdmin training sessions over the span of two days. The current Redhat configuration is adequate; providing a modicum of functionality for our users, and an acceptable ease of maintenance for our admins. The keywords are 'modicum' and 'acceptable'. Redhat's distribution historically suffers from a list of problems that are only partly alleviated by apt-rpm and other third-party tools. |