[K12OSN] K12LTSP missing some important stuff for our school purposes

[Timothy Legge]

Hi Tom

> 2. Sound -- I have about 25 workstations I'd like to use with K12LTSP... but
> they are all pretty diverse platforms: many different NICs, sound cards, and
> video cards. Is there any easy way to do this...? Or is it a matter of
> researching each individual hardware setup to get things rolling? I'm
> thinking of sinking for a couple dozen $20 network cards so that at least I
> have that in common. Besides, booting workstations with floppies seems to me
> to be too much of a hassle.

Since you are in Alberta, take a look at http://vfxweb.com for Network 
cards.  They have used 3com cards for as little as 4.00 and often have 
PXE bootable cards for fairly cheap.

They also sell a number of sound cards for pretty cheap.

I have some experience with network cards, floppies, boot roms etc.  I 
would say it is a reliability/cost tradeoff.  Boot floppies are cheapest 
but not always reliable.  Even if the floppy works, it may be misplaced.

These days I go with PXE, Etherboot Roms, Floppy in that order.  PXE 
does not alway work reliably and I have several PCs that use PXE to 
download Etheboot because the PXE rom will not boot a kernel but will 
boot Etherboot.

I have a rom programmer but the 3com 3c905C is usable as a cheap eprom 
programmer.  You can often reclaim good rom chips from hardware that you 
are tossing...

> 4. K12LTSP on Pentium I & II / 10 Mbps networks -- slow and unusable! I see
> lots of people talking about using old hardware with K12LTSP but I'm only
> getting acceptable performance from PIII/500+ MHz 100 Mbps NIC, and this
> seems to me to be a minimum hardware requirement. Even then, something like
> Celestia crawls compared to the way it does with a local hard drive
> installation. Any tips? Am I missing something?

10 Mbps is pretty much useless especially as a lot of 10 Mbps "switches" 
are just hubs which means everyone is sharing the 10 Mbps.  I have used 
as little as a 486 but you don't really want to.

We don't currently accept donations of hardware less than a PII but 
mostly is is just an attempt to slowly move forward.

If you can avoid it, you don't want to deal with ISA and old video cards 
and monitors.  You want any piece of hardware you have to be useable 
without configuration when you plug it in.  Old monitors/videocards do 
not always sync automatically so I just avoid the really old (circa 
1995) stuff now.

> Despite the hurdles I'm pretty interested and optimistic. It seems like an
> amazing project, though certainly NOT "easy and working, duh?" yet.

Linux thin clients are by far one of the best ways to really increase 
reliability and decrease support requirements.  It takes a little work 
to tweak it but essentially runs itself after that...

Tim