[K12OSN] Window managers (was: new splash screen for K12ltsp)

[Caleb Wagnon]

Andy Rabagliati said:
> ......Folks mention IceWM - but I find it just a little too bland. Heaven
> knows what IceWM Lite looks like :-)

I think icewm when running without gnome's nautilus interface and all is
considered icewm-lite. You can theme the taskbar and such...but that's about
it. Yes, it's very bland put next to the others.  Not near the customizations,
but in a place where you need all the resources you can get and don't need
folks to waste time playing with customizing anyway....it's a wonderful thing.
;-)

> ....Is the limit graphics bandwidth, or opening and closing ~/.gconf*/*
> little files all the time on my IDE disks ?

This isn't really a hard disk issue, but rather its bandwidth. Gnome and KDE
are a lot prettier and there's a lot more to them. Much more complex than ice
so there is a lot more bandwidth consumption. If you want your users to have
these goodies....then go with gnome or kde. I use KDE on my workstation. I've
been kde addict all my life. KDE has a lot further to go with ltsp
compatibility than gnome and icewm though.

> Yes, I know SCSI is better, but schools here are very price conscious,
> and SCSI is 4x the price.

It all depends on how much the drive is gonna be accessed. You could say you
need scsi over 15 machines.....but what if the terminals are doing something
that rarely requires disk access? With an implementation growing toward the
100 terminals level with openoffice and mozilla....you'd better believe we've
got scsi. In this kind of situation.....you can spend 4x the price of ide on
scsi or you can pay the price of an ide drive *and* 4x the price when you end
up swapping out for a scsi =)

> Anyone done any benchmarking they can share ?

The crudest terminals to server ration I have had and still work fine is this:

SINGLE 1.8ghz xeon with 18gb scsi and 4gb ram with 30 terminals running
*CONCURRENTLY* iceWM and mixtures of mozilla, and openoffice. That was our
load test....it was a little slow at times but still worked good. We cranked
up a few more terminals later during this test and things got really jerky,
but never froze up.


-- 
Caleb Wagnon MCP A+ CCNA
Technology Coordinator
Fordyce School District
870.352.2968
http://redbugs.dsc.k12.ar.us