[K12OSN] Workstation setup troubles

[Kari Matthews]

Hi everyone,

I am new here, and I have been reading the list for the last few days with
great interest.  I wanted to introduce myself and then ask a quick
question.  My name is Kari; I am the administrator for a small Catholic
school in a rural IL community.  I recently talked the principal into
letting me buy all new computers and I sold him on the idea of Linux (about
which I knew only enough to be dangerous).  I had never played w/ Linux
before taking the job as admin at the school but I do have quite a bit of
windows networking experience (like NT4, 2000, 2003 servers).

I got a friend to help me with setup -- edubuntu on the workstations, ubuntu
server.  He knew quite a bit about linux, so he set the whole thing up and
moved the data from the SuSE hard drive to the Ubuntu HD and whatnot.  He is
no longer available to answer setup questions, and I have no documentation
as to what exactly he did.

My questions are:

1.  He set up SMB-LDAP to authenticate on the server.  Does anyone have any
experience with this?  I need to reinstall edubuntu on a couple of servers
but am not sure what the procedure is to get them to login to the server.

2.  My younger kids *really* like GCompris, but it dies, crashes, and is
generally uncooperative when the workstation is logged in to the server.  It
works great on machines that are logged in locally.  Any ideas about how I
can remedy GCompris' performance for students who are logged in to the
server?

3.  My students want to write a school newspaper.  Besides OO Writer, does
anyone have any suggestions for a MSPublisher-comparable tool that is open
source?  I tried horsing around w/ Scribus but never could make anything in
Scribus print.  Everything else on the workstations prints just fine.
Scribus seemed a little too InDesign-like anyway, and the 7th graders found
it extremely difficult.

I look forward to getting to know all of you.  I am hoping soon to have a
"grand opening" of my lab, complete w/ pix and video on the web, so you all
can see what's going on.  I'd love to hear more about your configurations at
your schools, too, and what programs you're using.  I teach technology at my
school -- do any of you teach?  Any interesting curriculum ideas or
suggestions out there?  I'm also interested in ideas about training
computer-phobic staff who think that Linux will give them the plague.  LOL ,
the staff at my school are terrified to give the workstations a look around
for fear of breaking something.  I'm sure that's not a unique experience.

Best,
Kari Matthews
www.smswestville.k12.il.us
(under construction -- a brand new Joomla site that is not quite ready but
is getting there)
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