On Saturday 02 February 2002 14:33, Rob Maltby wrote:
Michael,
I for one would be extremely interested in a workshop on this subject.
For what it's worth, I experimented with putting all of the RM Connect File system onto a Mandrake 7.2 Samba Server and running a few clients from it. It mostly worked although there was a problem with the portmapper file that RM use to connect to to their User Manager and Password Manager utilities. The filename is RMRPCNT. I set up all the permissions after scanning through the batch files and inf files on the 2.2 and 2.3 update disks, and then made sure the smb.conf file held all the right shares. I didn't get as far as setting up groups although it would not have been difficult. Using the setup I was able to do anetwork build using the standard RM setup disks. I couldn't check for differences in access speed (RM can be slow!) since I was using my own 233 box and a couple of 486s with an upgrade chip at 133MHz.
Rob Maltby
I think that training would be a good way of generating some of the funding required to get some of the work done. Schools have training budgets and I have just been running IT courses for SfE for science technicians. These were priced at £200 per delegate and I had 60 at each of 4 and another 4 are planned. You don't have to be brilliant at maths to work out how much SfE make on these - they pay me a fixed fee of £400! Hotel costs are about £50 per delegate. If we could get enough schools to pay for a day's INSET in this way the excess profits could be put into open source projects on education applications. We therefore kill two birds with one stone by increasing the knowledge base and financing improved software. The main snag is advertising the courses and SfE have a well established brand and economies of scale. Still, if there was sufficient interest we could get the ball rolling - we just need all those on the list to pester their school INSET planners saying that they must attend the course as it has the potential to enable the school to save a lot of money. Headteachers will usually listen to that type of argument. Regards, -- IanL