February 2002 - openSUSE Edu - openSUSE Mailing Lists

printing to network printer
by James & Cybèle 02 Feb '02

02 Feb '02

I want to print to a printer that sits on the network attached to a dedicated print server. Is there a really quick and easy way to do this from SuSE 6.4. thanks James C

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Schools Linux distro
by Rob Maltby 02 Feb '02

02 Feb '02

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

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linux-format hard drive?
by Ron Johnson 02 Feb '02

02 Feb '02

Dear Anyone I've got a windoze machine -sorry - I'm putting in 2nd hard drive to put Red Hat 7.2 on - do I have to format hard drive first? I'v got a LTSP set up at school - need to find and try out as much Linux educational stuff as I can at home. I'm going to be using Linux at home for my personal use as well - but have to keep Windoze for games Sorry very simple question but then again I'm a simple guy. Thanks in advance and for great info previously provided. Yours Ronald __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro
by Chris Howells 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Michael Brown wrote: > Not sure that any of us have the resources to create a distro, even if we > all combine. Our preferred approach is to customise existing distros (in > our case, Mandrake, for now). Yes, perhaps I didn't quite make this clear enough before ;) I certainly don't intend to create a distro from scratch. Just take an existing one (e.g. Red Hat 7.2, which I chose for a few reasons), rip out the irrelevant packages (games, GNOME, etc), hack the bootup floppies a bit, and burn a CD with the new system on. I'm afraid SuSE is out for a few reasons. The main reason is that SuSE do not create freely downloadable/reusable ISOs of the system. Addtionally, I consider SuSEConfig and YaST to be largely a pain in the ar$e. <snip> > maintaining an enterprise-wide network of five thousand computers should > be barely noticeable.' > A few of the features: > o Allows installation of workstations with only a floppy disk and two > keypresses (the two keypresses are required only as a safety check). No > further manual intervention required. > o For all servers other than the first: allows installation of servers > with only a floppy disk and about 10 keypresses. No further manual >intervention required. <snip> > Although the design document is incomplete beyond the specification, the > code has passed proof of concept stage and is nearing alpha release. > You might find this tool helpful; it's a lot easier to take a 'standard' > distro and reconfigure it than it is to repackage everything with your > desired configuration. :-) Right, this sounds very good :) Have you thought about perhaps taking a standard distro and adding this stuff to this, burning a CD and distributing it? This is pretty much what I want to do. You say that you can install a workstation by only presssing a few keys. Does this work on all distros (or even FreeBSD?)? If so, how? > Kickstart is nowhere near flexible enough to be relied upon as a primary > distribution method. Believe me; we have tried this type of method for > some time and it is not adequate to the task. Essentially, it comes down > to a concept flaw shared by many, many systems (including some that I have > written myself): there is a reliance upon a known initial state. Ah right. Well, I don't really understand what you mean by this. Would you mind explaining a little more? > On the server side, CUPS would be used for the printing system and all > machines will have ext3 formatted hard discs. Reiser! ;-) > * Have a central administration databases where: > - User names and groups are managed > - Print and disc quotas are managed > - Software can be allocated to a machine/group of machines > - The central configuration files are located > <snip> > If any configuration files (e.g. /etc/host or similair) have been modified, > the updated versions would be downloaded. Perhaps CVS could be used here. > * A database such as NIS would probably be used for the administrative > database LDAP is more flexible, has many desirable side-benefits and (in theory) interoperable with Win2K. > It will also be possible to define the desktop menus (e.g. KMenu) that > will appear on the user's desktop. This will be based around .desktop > files, and a utility will convert these files to Blackbox menus so > that the menu is kept consistent between different desktops. The Debian menu system (also integrated into Mandrake and probably a few other distros) will keep all window manager menus synchronised. Well worth a look.

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Schools distro
by Paul Sutton 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Great idea, the latest Linux format pg 11 has a short article on blue linux - www.bluelinux.org which is said to be a school friendly distribution, perhaps you could take a look at this, this is part of the schoolforge.project. Worth checking out and perhaps helping with as it seems that both projects would have the same aims, and in this case the distro is there, Hope this is of some help or could possibly save time, Paul

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RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro
by Chris Howells 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Chris Puttick wrote: > Send later intentions aside, the comments are interesting. YAST and YAST2 > are exactly *why* SuSE are effective in persuading new users that Linux is a > "good thing". Yes, they can be useful. The main problem with them is speed. YaST and SuSEconfig are extremely slow on my PII 300. The fastest machine that I know of in this place is a celeron 700 -- many of the machines are still 486s or early pentiums :( I wouldn't hesitate putting Debian or even red Hat onto such an old machine; unfortunately I would hesitate with SuSE. > Moreover, I understand why they do not make all 7 CDs (of > Professional) downloadable ISOs; consider the bandwidth - they do provide > an > ftp installation method, as well as their highly effective (7.2/3 onwards) > online update. This is true. However, they do still provide a single CD evaulation. I would have a bit more sympathy if SuSE produced a "download" version consisting of a single CD-ROM that could be installed (like they used to). ;) > However, most schools will be more persuaded by "£50 site > licence and look at this shiny media/manuals set" than "look at this CD I > burned and wrote on", as would most companies. I fully agree. That would be one of the problems with my approach :( Chris Howells

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Schools Linux distro
by Chris Howells 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

> Pay a fair day's wage for a fair day's work and we might find some people > prepared to get Linux moving. Chris, you have already said that you are not > going to work full time on this. Is anyone? I doubt it ;) Like I said I'm an A-Level student so couldn't sacrifice a great deal of time to it. But getting it working for the first time should be the only difficult and time consuming bit. After a new version of the main distro is released, it should only take a while to integrate the patches into the newer version of the main distro (that's the theory, anyway) ;) > Will a slick system arrive in > time for me not to install XP. I have my doubts. If I can help in a small > way, though, I am happy to help you. Thanks. Well, I still don't know whether it's going to happen yet or not, but also thanks to all the other people who have registered interest :) Chris Howells

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RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro
by Chris Puttick 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Send later intentions aside, the comments are interesting. YAST and YAST2 are exactly *why* SuSE are effective in persuading new users that Linux is a "good thing". Moreover, I understand why they do not make all 7 CDs (of Professional) downloadable ISOs; consider the bandwidth - they do provide an ftp installation method, as well as their highly effective (7.2/3 onwards) online update. However, most schools will be more persuaded by "£50 site licence and look at this shiny media/manuals set" than "look at this CD I burned and wrote on", as would most companies. You'll also find the source of all the open source software on the SuSE CD set. And the command line is still there if you want it. We carefully considered all the major distributions before settling on SuSE 6 months ago. We also have RedHat, Debian (Corel...), and now (thanks to Fen Systems...) Mandrake. SuSE was selected as our defacto distribution of choice because it did everything it should, without fuss or much requirement to RTFM before we could get started, and it looks nice. We can sell it to the schools and the LEA, and, more importantly, sell the idea of open source as quality software (and have done - to all and sundry - watch this space for news). By the way, all the above is IMNSHO... :-) Regards Chris Puttick Central Manchester City Learning Centre 0161 212 1972/70 -----Original Message----- From: Chris Howells To: suse-linux-uk-schools(a)suse.com Sent: 2/1/02 1:55 PM Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro Michael Brown wrote: > Not sure that any of us have the resources to create a distro, even if we > all combine. Our preferred approach is to customise existing distros (in > our case, Mandrake, for now). Yes, perhaps I didn't quite make this clear enough before ;) I certainly don't intend to create a distro from scratch. Just take an existing one (e.g. Red Hat 7.2, which I chose for a few reasons), rip out the irrelevant packages (games, GNOME, etc), hack the bootup floppies a bit, and burn a CD with the new system on. I'm afraid SuSE is out for a few reasons. The main reason is that SuSE do not create freely downloadable/reusable ISOs of the system. Addtionally, I consider SuSEConfig and YaST to be largely a pain in the ar$e. <snip> > maintaining an enterprise-wide network of five thousand computers should > be barely noticeable.' > A few of the features: > o Allows installation of workstations with only a floppy disk and two > keypresses (the two keypresses are required only as a safety check). No > further manual intervention required. > o For all servers other than the first: allows installation of servers > with only a floppy disk and about 10 keypresses. No further manual >intervention required. <snip> > Although the design document is incomplete beyond the specification, the > code has passed proof of concept stage and is nearing alpha release. > You might find this tool helpful; it's a lot easier to take a 'standard' > distro and reconfigure it than it is to repackage everything with your > desired configuration. :-) Right, this sounds very good :) Have you thought about perhaps taking a standard distro and adding this stuff to this, burning a CD and distributing it? This is pretty much what I want to do. You say that you can install a workstation by only presssing a few keys. Does this work on all distros (or even FreeBSD?)? If so, how? > Kickstart is nowhere near flexible enough to be relied upon as a primary > distribution method. Believe me; we have tried this type of method for > some time and it is not adequate to the task. Essentially, it comes down > to a concept flaw shared by many, many systems (including some that I have > written myself): there is a reliance upon a known initial state. Ah right. Well, I don't really understand what you mean by this. Would you mind explaining a little more? > On the server side, CUPS would be used for the printing system and all > machines will have ext3 formatted hard discs. Reiser! ;-) > * Have a central administration databases where: > - User names and groups are managed > - Print and disc quotas are managed > - Software can be allocated to a machine/group of machines > - The central configuration files are located > <snip> > If any configuration files (e.g. /etc/host or similair) have been modified, > the updated versions would be downloaded. Perhaps CVS could be used here. > * A database such as NIS would probably be used for the administrative > database LDAP is more flexible, has many desirable side-benefits and (in theory) interoperable with Win2K. > It will also be possible to define the desktop menus (e.g. KMenu) that > will appear on the user's desktop. This will be based around .desktop > files, and a utility will convert these files to Blackbox menus so > that the menu is kept consistent between different desktops. The Debian menu system (also integrated into Mandrake and probably a few other distros) will keep all window manager menus synchronised. Well worth a look. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-unsubscribe(a)suse.com For additional commands, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-help(a)suse.com

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro
by Chris Howells 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Grr, sorry, I hit reply on the last mail. I only meant to hit "send later". Apologies ;)

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Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Plans for a Linux distro
by Chris Howells 01 Feb '02

01 Feb '02

Christopher Dawkins wrote: > Still thinking about these things. Where are the applnk & config fies > documented? Hrm, there is some documentation somewhere. I can't find it at the moment, I'm afraid (.desktop files are used in both KDE and GNOME btw). Chris Howells

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