[Opensource] Using Ubuntu in School

[Cameron Bell]

Bravo Adam! Great work!
Having this will certainly reduce the amount of investigation and 
playing required when getting Ubuntu up and running in schools.
I reckon the other thing that I had to keep looking up often after each 
re-install was the config of the apt.conf file so that it would update 
through the school proxy server.
Acquire::http::proxy "http://username:password@proxyIP:port";
seems to work for me. There were some very convoluted conf files out 
there, but this simple one works.
My issues at the moment:
1) Getting the edupass to connect automatically. At the moment I have to 
manually select edupass from the nm applet to bring up the keychain.
2) There is a significant amount of lag time when writing on our 
smartboards. I write and then their is about a 1.5-2 second delay before 
the writing appears
3) Data projectors! AUUGHHHH.  Can't get videos to appear on the data 
projector although I could in the past. I have one data projector that 
is identical to all the others that won't accept the screen resolution 
of the laptop - it only runs at 800x600 when all the others are quite 
happy at 1024x768. Makes me think it's the DP but I can't find any 
setting that might change it.
On the plus side, Markbook works wonderfully in a Innotek Virtual Box.
I mucked around with SUSE for a while, we purchased 10.1, but found the 
wireless was severely lacking - having to use ndiswrappers and the like. 
Yuck. We have no Novell to integrate but I can certainly see where SUSE 
would come into its own there. I have found Ubuntu to be the easiest 
distro so far, but the great thing about linux is you can choose one 
that best suits your needs.
Cheers
Cameron



Adam Barbary wrote:
> I have been trying to put together a howto for using Ubuntu Linux in 
> school. I have been using it myself on my laptop for the last 12 
> months at school and have managed to sort out a few common issues you 
> may have if you try to implement it yourself. With encouragement from 
> Roland, I have started a wiki at VITTA that you can access and edit at 
> your leisure. I'm hoping that people will be able to add all sorts of 
> things to the wiki and help create a valuable resource that will help 
> teachers implement a viable alternative to the dominant desktop system.
>
> So far I have covered;
> - Novel Shares
> - Edumail LDAP and email
> - Edupass Wifi (this I have linked to an Ubuntu list, as I did not 
> figure this out myself)
>
> The kids at my school have had a go at installing Ubuntu and 
> especially love the cube desktop and window effects. It is also a buzz 
> for them to hook the system up to their home directory on the network. 
> I would love to see people contribute not just to the initial setup, 
> but also a list of educational activities using FOSS (in particular 
> Ubuntu) would be nice too.
>
> http://www.vitta.org.au/wiki/Ubuntu_in_Schools
>
> Cheers,
>
> Adam Barbary
> Viewbank College _______________________________________________
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