knoppix in school

[VeeDubb]

I'll try and keep this to the point.

I work at an after-school program ata low income school. After spring break I will be teaching a geometry class and wanted to use geometer's sketchpad, but tht's a lot of money for 4 to 6 workstations, plus, PC's are hard to come by at that school.

But today it struck me.
I do have access to a number of NIC's. If you're not familiar an NIC (New Internet Computer) is a stripped down internet only computer with a 200 mhz CPU 60MB ram and no hard drive or floppy. It uses a specialy designed sun microsystems uni that only has a web browser, which, like knoppix, runs entirely from the CD. Today I tried knoppix because I remembered that it comes with kreative geometry, which would work fine. And it did boot. Of course all I got was an X-window, but I was able to use the left mouse button menu to launch the program and it ram fine, but load times were BAD.

My question is, what can I do to make things run faster or smoother, or make starting up more simple for the kids? I don't think I have enough computer of my own to recompile my knoppix CD, so I'm stuck using boot commands. Remember, there's no hard disk OR floppy.

Anyway, any suggestions appreciated.

[audioaficionado]

The only problem I see is that 60Mb of ram and no swap possibilities. KDE would crash for sure. Even the ligher IceWM would crash after you loaded up a few programs. You can F2 cheat code into the other window managers and try it out. Forget KDE.

[rickenbacherus]

There has been much discussion about booting Knoppix w/ small amounts of RAM. The only way to do it (as far as I know) is to have a swap file on a hard drive. I know this doesn't help you. As far as remastering goes you really just need hard drive space. It would take longer on for example a 233MHz than a 500MHz of course but it can be done. My only guess would be:
knoppix desktop=xfce
a very light and intuitive interface although fluxbox is also quite easy on resources.

[RockMumbles]

VeeDubb,

Do you have access to one computer you could run knoppix on or much better yet install a linux distro and run it as an application and X-window server? Then you could use knoppix on the NIC's and run them as X-terminals to log into and run the apps from the "server" computer.

A friend still uses a p-200 w/ 160mb ram as his app server, and has 5 or 6 X-terminals running that connect to the server in his office, they primarily use netscape and Star-Office in his business. You will notice a bit of network lag, but I can run knoppix on my p-150 w/32mb and a hd swap as an X-term no problem and run apps ie; openoffice, mozilla etc. in kde from my AMD350 w/128mb ram much faster than trying to run knoppix from cd on the p-150 even with a lightweight window manager.

If you wanted to run knoppix from cd on the server you'd have to get kdm running with xdmcp and if you don't have a router already on the network you'd have to get dhcpd running so you could give ip addresses to the X-terms, it's probably best to run the server with a static ip address.

rock

[audioaficionado]

Yeah, like RockMumbles says.

Get a real cheap PII with a HD and make it a server and the rest of the computers thin clients with bootable NICs. No HD or floppy needed.

[garyng]

What is the hardware requirement to run X-terminal which in this case would be a base Linux plus XFree86 right ?

Still learning as I am a Window user tasting Linux because of the KNOPPIX concept.

[RockMumbles]

As far as the X-terminal computers a pentium class computer (actually even a 486 will work if it has a pci motherboard, it'll be slower) with a supported pci graphic card (2MB if you want to use 1024x768 resolution, many older cards will work OK as X-terms with the vesa driver) probably 32MB of system ram and a 300 - 500MB hard drive. A pentium computer with ps/2 keyboard and mouse would be best choice, just because of replacement mouse and keyboard availability.

Note: you're not going to be playing games on these, they are for internet and office type applications and for that kind of use they function very well.

As far as the X-Term OS you need a base system, networking, and X.

rock

[audioaficionado]

I'd like to see a PCI 486 mobo. Mine only does ISA. A 2meg ISA video card would be nice too.

[rec9140]

I'll try and keep this to the point.

I work at an after-school program ata low income school. After spring break I will be teaching a geometry class and wanted to use geometer's sketchpad, but tht's a lot of money for 4 to 6 workstations, plus, PC's are hard to come by at that school.

But today it struck me.
I do have access to a number of NIC's. If you're not familiar an NIC (New Internet Computer) is a stripped down internet only computer with a 200 mhz CPU 60MB ram and no hard drive or floppy. It uses a specialy designed sun microsystems uni that only has a web browser, which, like knoppix, runs entirely from the CD. Today I tried knoppix because I remembered that it comes with kreative geometry, which would work fine. And it did boot. Of course all I got was an X-window, but I was able to use the left mouse button menu to launch the program and it ram fine, but load times were BAD.

My question is, what can I do to make things run faster or smoother, or make starting up more simple for the kids? I don't think I have enough computer of my own to recompile my knoppix CD, so I'm stuck using boot commands. Remember, there's no hard disk OR floppy.

Anyway, any suggestions appreciated.

Take a look at the Linux Terminal Server Project at:
http://k12ltsp.org/contents.html

Also take a look at Linux on ITX based boards:
http://mini-itx.com/store/

[A. Jorge Garcia]

OK, I'm getting a new lab next year for my compsci classes. I'm wondering how I could set it up. Could I knx-hdinstall one PC and set it up as a file server that all the other PCs could logon to so my students could save their files in one place? In other words, could I simply use the KNOPPIX CD on those other machines and login remotely to the server machine? Can I use xdm or kdm this way? How would I get a login screen?

TIA,