I am writing this from the ScribeFire extension for firefox. It seems pretty cool. Life has been pretty busy these last couple of weeks. Trying to get project widgetnest off the ground. Starting sumer semester and trying to get my senior project started/approved. Its a frustrating process that is all I will say.
Oh yes I am going to try out the GTD process of organization It looks pretty interesting and I hope it will work for me better than my current system of organization. It expresses alot of how I think things should be done and I couldn’t really find anything to say see this is why it won’t work for me. Like I have with other organizational processes.
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Yesterday I set up an Edubuntu server for the Jefferson Montessori School. They have been running the straight Ubunutu for the past year. However, it hasn’t been an ideal situation. They have limited resources(money) and I have limited time. So the two seemed to conspire against us and cause all sorts of problems. I plan on changing that by installing Edubuntu server in each of the Class Rooms.
The following is just a list illustrating some of the problems I had with a straight Ubuntu solution for the school.
- NIS its just a pain, and doesn’t play well with NFS on Ubuntu
- We had a single server that was acting as everything. While it could handle everything when it went down everything went down since the home directories were located there.
- Teachers couldn’t easily push software to their students computers. Edubuntu makes this easy.
- Keeping all the computers up to date was hard with no central way to see what computers needed updating.
While these were my top complaints with a straight ubuntu school system we will be testing out this next week to see if it is a better option than the previous solution.
The problems I had with Edubuntu
- DHCP-
I would of thought that the DHCP would of configured itself properly or at least asked for some configuration during the install. But nope it didn’t work out of the box. I had to do the following:
- configure my second ether network card to 192.168.0.1. it was configured to 192.168.0.254 yet the dhcp file in /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf is set to use a 192.168.0.1 address.
- Had to set the interface to listen on in the /etc/default/dhcp3-server
- I then had to copy the /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf to /etc/dhcp/
- started the dhcp server (my network card wasn’t up so it gave me some problems here. Make sure it is up. check by using the ifconfig command. the edubuntu network manager showed the system as up but it really wasn’t for some strange reason.)
- The thin client manager shows that you can view the students deskto. But you have to install x11vnc to the chroo. I don’t know much about this and could find no good documentation on how to do it.
So far those are my biggest complaints with edubuntu. Both of these are easily solved by better documentation which will come with time as more people use the system. Some may ask why post this here then? 1- it is easier to post it here and 2- I don’t know if what I did is actually how it is supposed to go together.
Well that its for now. Let you know how this little expirement goes.
