[Opensource] Using Ubuntu in School

[victor rajewski]

On 9/4/07, Cameron Bell <bell.cameron.p at edumail.vic.gov.au> wrote:
> 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.

I've been setting this in general gnome settings
(system->preferences->network proxy) for use by synaptic, and for the
command line I use the environment variable (export
http_proxy=http://proxy.address:8080).

Incidentally, netspace has an ubuntu mirror on its ftp service
(ftp.netspace.net.au) which makes downloads and updates super-fast and
doesn't add to your download bill. A typical line in
/etc/apt/sources.list is:
deb http://ftp.netspace.net.au/pub/ubuntu/ feisty main restricted

> 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.

I used to have this problem, but it has (mostly) gone away. I've had
another problem with wifi not coming up after sleeping, but I've
posted a workaround to the wiki until the known bug gets fixed
(hopefully in gusty)

> 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.

This is one showstopper for linux at the moment. I'll be a lot happier
when a nice graphical solution to multiple displays on arbitrary video
cards is available.

> On the plus side, Markbook works wonderfully in a Innotek Virtual Box.

How is performance in innotek compared with vmware? I find vmware kinda slow.

vik