[K12OSN] Miscelaneous questions: Customizing menus and booting PowerPC "Chubby Clients"

[Brad Smith]

Hello all,

First, an update on my progress. Then I have some questions, only a
couple of which are actually mac-related, so bear with me. I'd
appreciate any advice that can be offered.

Thanks to some advice on this list and a great deal of tinkering
around, I have managed to get an ancient Powermac G3 up and running as
an ltsp client.

It's currently running Yellow Dog Linux ver 2.1 (anything later didn't
make it past the installer), with a tweaked inittab that just has it
do an "X -query 192.168.0.254" to access the ltsp server. In my
messings-around with it since I've run into a few things I have
questions about:


1) YDL seems to simply ignore any attempts to mount and nfs root
partition. Nfs support is in the kernel, but the nfsroot=... arg seems
to simply get ignored. Anyone know about this?

2) Do I really need to care about the system not nfs-booting? Since
the machine has its own local root partition it can boot and connect
to the server fine. I lose the system-specific config options in
lts.conf, but the network will be heterogenous, so that shouldn't be
too much of a problem. Am I missing anything?

...now the non-mac stuff:

3) Whenever I try to add/modify a menu entry (say the 'Education'
menu) I get an error about 'Application:Education/.directory' being on
a read-only filesystem. As far as I can tell, this must be referring
to /usr/share/applnk/Education, but it is writable by root, who I am
logged in as.

5) Ultimately I'm trying to figure out the easiest means by which I
can trim the menu of available applications to eliminate things that
the average student is just going to be confused by and then push the
customized menus out to students or groups thereof. How nice would it
be, for example, to have different, age/subject appropriate,
simplified menus for each grade? Has anyone accomplished this? Are
non-gnome window mangers any better for it? I tried with icewm but,
while it's faster, the menus were, well, ugly and probably even more
confusing for a kid than the gnome menu.

6) What next? I appreciate the fact that k12ltsp comes with
educational software, but are there any "must have" educational apps
that aren't included? The school I'm working with will be mostly
middle schoolers.

Huge thanks in advance for any help,
--Brad