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OK, I'll take a stab at this. Linux in *any* school is a good idea, for so many reasons. Easier maintenance is just one of them. What you describe sounds like a great application for LTSP and thin clients--some might even say "the canonical case if ever there was one." Here's why: 1.) If the kids physically beat up on the thin clients, no problem; just swap out an old PC that PXE-boots. Done. Very inexpensive fix. 2.) You only install the apps that you want. If you don't want to give them, say, OpenOffice.org, then don't install it. You want them to have basically only Firefox, then you can do that. 3.) If you've got the LTSP server locked away (yes, you always need physical security!), then the kids can't mess with the server and get root. 4.) If you're worried about power outages, then just put the LTSP server on an UPS. APCUPSD, which comes with most GNU/Linux distributions, will execute a clean shutdown of the server if the power outage goes for too long and the UPS batteries start getting low. Much like PowerChute Plus. 5.) Relating to #4, the thin clients won't ever have filesystem corruption. They're thin clients--no hard disk to corrupt! :-) 6.) You don't need to "unlock" the system (I assume you mean similar to Deep Freeze on MS Windows here). IT staff are the only ones who should have root. You just become root, and the system's unlocked--FOR YOU--until you exit out of root mode. 7.) A GNU/Linux system is by nature considerably more resistant to attempted break-ins than one running, say, MS Windows. It's just built better. It will certainly last the 10 minutes that you mentioned below. That said, *NO SYSTEM* remains that way unless you do your regular security updates. Nor will any system resist break-in attempts well if you just configure it to be wide-open, obviously. 8.) Should you get cracked, 0wn3d, or whatever term you prefer, then yes, IT staff definitely will need to get involved. Big time. Again, that's with *any* system, be it MS Windows, Novell NetWare, GNU/Linux, OpenBSD--even the IBM Mainframe z/OS. No system that I know of automatically "heals itself" once it's been compromised. 9.) Hard disks will, sooner or later, *always* fill up. Again, any system. However, another big issue, disk fragmentation, tends to be handled a lot better with GNU/Linux than with Microsoft's NTFS. Not that the NTFS is "bad", necessarily; it was a most welcome improvement over FAT. But ext3 simply does it better. Now, for your question about "does the USB stuff work," that depends on whether you're in a "thick client" or LTSP environment. Those answers differ. With GNU/Linux thick clients, I can tell you that every USB device that *I* have personally tried has worked with no problem. That includes USB thumb drives, portable hard disks, digital cameras, and HP OfficeJets. I've not had a sound card "not work" for many years. However, if your machine uses Broadcom wireless, then that takes a small amount of tweaking to make work. That's only an issue with wireless laptops, really. But you should know about it. With thin clients, remember that, in an LTSP environment, everything runs on the server, not the thin client. Despite that, YES, you can save to certain local storage media on the thin client. The LTSP development team did some very clever hackery to make that work! I've done this with floppies many times. I also read that USB thumb drives have been supported since K12LTSP 4.4.1 (there's a Wiki entry on how to make this work). Presumably that would include any other kind of "normal" USB storage medium, such as a USB portable hard disk or digital camera. Hopefully this helps. I could easily put more in here, but it's probably already too long. --TP _______________________________
Do you GNU? Microsoft Free since 2003--the ultimate antivirus protection! Chuck Kollars wrote:
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