[Gllug] London councils and Unix/Linux

[Kim Hawtin]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2002 at 07:48:38PM +0000, Jim Bailey wrote:

> >>>I don't know if anyone caught the bbc 10 oclock news last night
> >>>the gov unveiled it new plan for super IT schools and a school
> >>>sent a tape in showing the state of there IT dept. Most
> >>>distressing was the room full of old PCs donated and bought
> >>>that were just sitting there doing nothing bcause the school
> >>>had no where to put them.  Volunteers anyone.

> >How feasable is it to set up a system based on a couple of nice
> >servers (locked securely) and running a bunch of very cheap
> >X-client machines in the classroom.
 
> Not that difficult Diskless nodes Howto spring to mind

> >Now I know that people will nick pretty much anything - but could
> >these classroom machines be low enough spec that school security
> >would be adequate (and still good enough to work on) ?
> 
> Not absolutely sure but I know a lot of old machines have 1,2 and
> 4 meg graphics using system Ram.  8 and 16mb graphics cards can be
> bought for as little as £15 from computer fairs and mail order
> which should be able to handle things like the KDE desktop.  I
> personally use an 8mb AGP ATI card which runs KDE 2.2 without any
> problems, though admittedly I have a Duron 650 cpu.
> >
> There are a lot of things that could be done again volunteers
> anyone.

ok, this kind of setup i tried a couple of years ago. all the
classroom boxes ran a tinyx install and used xdm to login to the
"terminal server". we ended up cutting the classroom network into 4
10Mbit ethernets, with 9 clients on each segment. although a 100Mbit
switch would handle this with out any problems =)

X traffic is lite, but not in the quantity of using netscape on each
machine and then more X apps ... for 35+ hosts =)

these machines were not well spec'd, 486, 8+ MBram ...
the server was scsi and 32 MB ram =)

yours,

kim
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