After school program using Knoppix

[msouden]

Hi All,

I'm a Linux newbie, and Knoppix might be able to really help out on a project I'm coordinating. Let me explain:

A nonprofit I work for is starting up an after school Science program for Middle Schoolers. The program has middle schoolers working with College volunteers on different little science projects (depending on their interest areas) and then building web sites about their experiments. It's fun, low budget, and a pilot run at the program.

Here's the challenge- the computer lab in the hosting school consists of older I-macs (OS 9) with absurd security measures in place- we can't save files to the desktops, let alone install any software. There is no server space available to us from the school system, and their version of making web pages consists of using AppleWorks and saving the documents as HTML.

I'd like to give these kids an experience more real-world in nature. We thought running a Knoppix live CD on several of these I-macs and having the kids build their simple sites using Mozilla Composer. Because we're working with 11-year-olds we need to make it as easy as possible, so running off of a live CD would be great.

We planned on using 8-12 Knoppix CDs for this project. (1 per group of 5) What I'm wondering is how feasible is it configure these Live CDs:

1. To run on older I-macs currently on OS9.

2. Is it possible to configure Knoppix with some sort of virtual drive setup so they could save files directly to the Nonprofit's dedicated server space- or use the Gmail Drive application with some dedicated gmail accounts? This would avoid having to teach 11-year-olds the intricacies of FTP or having to invest in USB drives.

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

[UnderScore]

Sounds like a great way to get more people exposed to Knoppix. However, to the best of my knowledge, officially Knoppix is only for the x86 CPU. Thus knoppix will not work in Apple PC that uses a PowerPC CPU. There may be unofficial projects or other linux live CDs avaiable for PPC and Apple PCs. This google search should be a good starting point (http://www.google.com/search?q=ppc+live+cd&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official).
I hope this helps.
James

[msouden]

Thanks James. it's looking like the Knoppix PPC live CD is't quite ready for primetime, but maybe I can create one that'll work well enough. we really just need Mozilla and it's composer, and Open Office.

[firebyrd10]

There was a knoppix PPC remaster going on that wasn't two far behind. I could find it from the docs, but they're down right now.

I'm not too sure how hard it would be to remaster the cds to automaticlly connect to servers and use them.
BTW what typer of servers are they?

[msouden]

Well, it's actually some server space we could dedicate from the nonprofit's web site host account- so I don't know the flavor exactly- I was hoping that if I set up FTP accounts for each group there would be some brilliant linux utility that I could use to make this look like 'drag-n-drop' filespace.

[firebyrd10]

Well, it's actually some server space we could dedicate from the nonprofit's web site host account- so I don't know the flavor exactly- I was hoping that if I set up FTP accounts for each group there would be some brilliant linux utility that I could use to make this look like 'drag-n-drop' filespace.

Konqueror alows this, just type

Ftp://server

and its drag-and-drop