Re: [OS:N:] newbie

[anthony baldwin <anthonybaldwin snet net>]

Robert Citek wrote:
> On Friday, May 28, 2004, at 11:53 US/Central, Will Hatch wrote:
>
> > Thanks for your reply.  My students use the computers for 
> > wordprocessing, browsing the web for research purposes (we do not have 
> > a library), and thats about it.  Gaming is not necessary, although 
> > chess or something simple such as chess would be ok.  They really do 
> > not have to be supersonic.  My main goals are that each work station 
> > is identical, that there is nothing on the computers that is not 
> > educational, and that I can save money by having computers that do not 
> > need constant upgrading of microsoft products.
>
>
> And how powerful are your machines that you have?  I ask because a full 
> install of Red Hat 9 or Fedora Core or most other Linux distros is going 
> to take about 6 BG of space (including swap and all the goodies).  Also 
> if you wish to run a full-featured GUI desktop like Gnome or KDE, I 
> would recommend a 800 MHZ CPU and a minimum 128 MB of RAM.

I've got a couple of 450mhz with only 96mb ram running RH8, and another 
machine, a Celeron 600mhz with 128mb ram running K12 3.1.2.  The 450's 
are a bit slow, but the 600Celeron does fine.
I've got a P100 running Damn Small Linux that runs great, too.
(I'm giving these old junkers away to students, recall, except the 
Celeron which belongs to my daughter, turning 5 on Tuesday, who plays 
with GCompris, Tux Paint and other goodies all the time with it.)
The 450's are in my classroom now and children use them for word 
processing and internet research, slide presentations, spreadsheets, 
drawings, and, sometimes I even let them get into the games.  KBounce, 
KFouleggs and KAsteroids have all grown rather popular for Friday study 
hall time.  These are standalone boxes, but they are on our mostly mac 
network sharing internet and printers.  I haven't figured out how to get 
the children into their student filespace on the Mac servers, though, so 
we move things around via floppy or e-mail, sometimes.  Also, I did have 
to lock them down so that a password is required to unlock the screen 
from kscreensaver, because they are bipassing the filtering software, 
and one day when I was out, a 7th grader got into some highly in 
appropriate websites (oops!).  Now that their locked out without my 
password, they can only use the boxes with strict supervision.

tony

> Given that your XP machines are probably the newer/faster machines, what 
> kind of hardware to they have?
>
> Regards,
> - Robert
>
>
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--
Anthony Baldwin
http://www.School-Library.net
Freedom to Learn!

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