Re: [K12OSN] perhaps a radical idea

[Jim Hays <haysja sages us>]

While I agree with some of your points about commecial distributions (which
Fedora is not not one), I disagree with the idea of turning K12LTSP into a set
of "scripts" that you can put on top of another disctibution.

Here is a case in point:

A couple of weeks ago, several "Tech-Geeks" (http://www.tech-geeks.org) gathered
at a small grade school in a small town in SE Illinois.  We installed K12LTSP in
their media center lab to "recover" some older hardware (and release them from
the grips of a certain software company).  The tech person at this school is not
a Linux "geek".  If she had to add scripts to the top of a distribution, she
never would have agreed to, nor convinced her sup't to agree to, trying K12LTSP.
 There are many more tech coordinators in schools that have NO Linux experience
that there are who have Linux experience.  The ones that I know with Linux
experience at all gained that experience from trying K12LTSP.

Having K12LTSP as a complete package - tied to a particular Linux distribution
with the simple install - is EXACTLY what makes it palatible to many people.  

K12LTSP is a great project as it is.  It has legs.  It is growing.  (I know that
I convinced my Sup't to increase the number of K12LTSP clients that we are
runnign for next year.)  Changing anything now would be a mistake.  Fedora won't
die.  There are too many people running K12LTSP to let that happen.

If you are enough of a Linux guru to add the LTSP pacakges to the top of Debian,
or Gentoo, or Mandrake, that is wonderful.  Most people who use K12LTSP would
not want to do that.

Please let me keep my simple, Fedora, install.  

I think I read this somewhere:

"It works. It's free. Duh..."





Quoting Quentin Hartman <qhartman lane k12 or us>:

> Colleagues-
> 	I've been tossing this idea around in my head for awhile now, and it
> seems it has become time to present it to the rest of you. With the
> demise of RHL as we know it, the complexities of relying so heavily on
> an upstream commercial distro to tightly integrate K12LTSP into has
> become apparent to many of us.
> 	Rather than moving to RHEL or WBEL (which in turn relies on a
> commercial upstream distro) is it time to start exploring other distros,
> preferably a community-oriented one? Maybe Debian? I mean, we're all
> using apt-get on our boxes anyway, so this would provide a pretty
> shallow learning curve for some of the most common tasks, and many of
> the others will be fundamentally the same. I know that fedora is
> technically community driven and would seem to provide an easier
> transition path in the short term, but since it is a fledgling system,
> there have been a lot of unanswered questions about just how stable it
> is going to be, whereas Debian has proven to be a Rock, for many years.
> I've seen these questions raised here and elsewhere.
> 	My personal favorite solution would be to try to divorce the K12LTSP
> system from any particular distro as much as possible by turning it into
> a set of customizable scripts that could be tweaked to take into account
> a variety of distros. I realize that this would be a pretty large
> undertaking and there are a lot of downsides to this, the most obvious
> one being the potential to fracture the little sub-community we have
> built up here, but I think that's surmountable. A look through the
> archives proves that K12LTSP is not the only thing this group is about.
>  	For example, I've been playing with making a K12LTSP ebuild for my
> distro of choice, Gentoo. I haven't put a whole bunch of time into it,
> but it seems doable, so once my universe settles down a bit, I am going
> to tackle it more seriously.
> 	So I guess this post boils down to three points:
> 
> 1- Should other distros be considered now as a platform for K12LTSP?
> 2- Should K12LTSP keep going as a "distro" like it is now, or would it
> be simpler *in the long term* to divorce from any particular distro?
> 3- Any other Gentoo odd-balls out there want to help me make an Ebuild
> for K12LTSP? ;)
> 
> I realize that these may very well no be popular suggestions, but I
> think they are things that should at least be discussed, and I
> personally would be willing put time into seeing some of them happen.
>   
> -- 
> -Just food for Thought-
> 
> -Quentin Hartman-
> 
> Academic Computing and Networking Services Coordinator
> Fern Ridge School District 28J
> Elmira, OR
> Office: 541-935-2253 x429
> Cell: 541-914-2989
> qhartman lane k12 or us
> www.fernridge.k12.or.us
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> 


-----------------------------------------
Jim Hays
Technology Director
Monticello CUSD#25
Monticello, IL  61856
-----------------------------------------