I'd like to help (well, after finals; so I'll be available in about 5 weeks time).
Ah. Well before I go any further I'll just point out that I'm a final year A-Level student, and have my A-Levels in may, so they have got to come first priority. My only connection with RM is that my place of education have an exceptionally bad RM Connect 1 network (which I am using now :( ). I don't study GNVQ IT myself, but the final straw came when I heard that the school had just bought VB to teach their students (they were origignally going to teach C++ or Delphi but couldn't afford the site licenses.
Would it be difficult to make the interface like RM Connect, so it'd be easy to pick up for people used to it?
And, presumably, RM Connect would have some sort of support with it, supplied by RM? I think that it would be important to have some sort of support system in place, otherwise schools (I
Good idea. presume)
wouldn't really look into it.
Yes, that would be a problem. However, I'm not really sure what form this distro might take at the moment, so I'll think about that later.
Also, universities are more likely to have Novell, or some sort of Unix system, rather than RM (in college here, we've got Netware 5, soon to be upgraded to Netware 6). Schools are going to be the most likely target audience.
Ah right. The only reason I included universities in the list is because I recently went to an Open Day at Queen Mary and they seemed to have a fair bit of RM kit...
You could use a static DHCP system - then you wouldn't need to enter the hostname, and the server will give the same IP address to that particular
workstation all the time. (Assuming you're talking about workstation; you
could supply a separate floppy disk & CD for the server). Presumably with
Yes, we would use DHCP. The thing I mean is the name of the box -- for example my machine at home is called venus, and this happens to be called itst24. the
workstation, you could just install the system via FTP/HTTP from the main
server? (i.e. having a copy of the distribution CDs copied onto the server hard drive)
Exactly.
You could use any distribution, and use GNU cfengine to make custom changes on a per-machine basis. It's very powerful software, and you can undoubtedly do what you want with it.
OK, sound something good to look at.
- From a programming perspective, completely differently. From an end-user perspective, fairly similar :-)
I'm mainly thinking of an administartive point of view. I have no idea how to restrict the GNOME desktop, but I can do this quite easily with KDE.
Stuff like Kylix and Open Office will also be provided. Be careful: you may find it difficult to distribute Kylix because it's non-Free software. You'd have to get permission from Borland.
Yes, I'm aware of that ;) The reason for including Kylix is as a replacement for VB, reasons mentioned above.
KDevelop is supposed to be nice for C/C++ QT apps, although I've never used it.
Ditto. I prefer vim ;)
And provide WINE - if it's in a school setting, they'll undoubtedly have some software that requires Windows (like ecctis).
Yes.
Sounds reasonable, although ReiserFS is more mature ;-) (start filesystem
flamewars here. And end here ;-)
LOL ;) Well ext3 had done me fine the last few months, it has a mailing list that the developers read, and it's compatible with ext2 :)
NIS is only used for sharing passwords. For the purposes described above, a simple MySQL database (or even some LDAP system, for people who like buzzwords) would probably be better.
Sorry yes. I did _intend_ to write LDAP, really ;)
Or simply have /home NFS mounted automatically at boot time, rather than at login time.
The reason for doing it at login is so that each users home directory will appear in the same place in the local file system. So even if the home directory was //server1/user1 or //server1/user2 it would always appear as /home/user. etc. Cheers, Chris Howells