Re: terminal servers

[Justin Maurer <justin slashdot org>]

On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 16:21, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> So getting this to work is a big deal for helping out schools.

[slightly offtopic? raving about the frustration and headaches LTSP
saved me :) but don't skip over the guinea pig for gnome part below]

	you are absolutely right, and i speak from personal experience.

	before i graduated high school a few months ago, our big project was
getting K12-LTSP (which uses gnome as its desktop environment) working
to serve our computer science lab. 

	i was peripherally involved in the PR campaign (i was more or less
designated the primary technical person), but i remember it meeting
shockingly little resistance. obviously our school district gave us the
official "we won't do tech support for you" line, which makes some
inkling of sense), but everyone involved was quite pleased at the
reduced budget we requested. we were quite pleased with the massive
hassle it saved us. at least i was, after administering the most
error-prone lab on earth :) after some initial overhead costs to buy
about 30 cheap clients and a big server, we had a cheap lab that worked
a hundred times better than anything before. end result: they save
money, we save sanity.

	we were not the first school to do this, another reason we met with
little resistance. paul nelson, a guy in oregon who does the k12-ltsp
stuff helps people set these labs up all over the country, and provides
anecdotal success stories, both from himself, and people he's helped.

	i no longer attend the school, but there is absolutely no doubt in my
mind that the guy in charge there now (technically and politically)
would absolutely leap at the chance to be used as a guinea pig, for any
purpose the gnome project would ask (again, technically or politically).
	
	last i checked, the _business_ computer lab was going to be upgraded to
the same system :)

-justin