Skubuntu Screenshots

[Jonathan Carter]

Hi Edward

Top posting. Grrr..

Edward Holcroft wrote:
> OK, I see I have the wrong end of the stick. You are no longer using  
> K12LTSP at all.

That's right.

> So now what happens to those 100 plus schools where the Tuxlabs are  
> K12LTSP based?

They are being upgraded to hoary. 13 schools have been upgraded, and 50 
will have been upgraded by October, which means that, effectively 50 
schools will be using Edubuntu (or at least something close to it) even 
before it's released :)

> What's the upgrade process? How does data, home directories and  
> usernames get easily imported into what is a very different distro? I  
> am asking this because I am interested in converting about 33  schools, 
> widely dispersed over four provinces to the Ubuntu-based  distro. Since 
> the cost of going to each site to upgrade is  prohibitive, we need a way 
> for the centre manager to just boot off a  CD and K12LTSP magically 
> becomes Skubuntu. This is a big ask, I know,  but essential, since our 
> site admins (with maybe one or two  exceptions) do not yet have the 
> technical expertise to manually back  up user data and usernames, 
> install a new distro and put everything  back.

This will probably not be a big deal in Edubuntu (since it would 
probably focuss on new installations), but it has been a big deal for 
us, who have similar situations to your 33 schools. Currently, we either 
take along an external hard disk, tar up /etc and /home (along with a 
few other crucial files like lts.conf, dhcpd.conf, etc) to the disk and 
re-install. Then we copy the home dirs back. This could be automated to 
some degree, desktops could be reset with the 'reset desktop' script 
(automatically, in the script, of course), but I think this is a bit far 
off in Skubuntu. We've been anticipating a move to Debian before October 
last year (just never got round to it- resource constraints, etc), so 
we've modified the K12-Desktop, so that when we upgrade to Debian, we'll 
have the exact same look and feel. Our schools don't know about K12LTSP 
or Fedora or Ubuntu, they just think it's the same OS with some new 
software :)

I like the idea of an auto-upgrade though. If you have enough 
disk-space, you could almost do it without reformatting (moving the 
entire old filesystem to something like /oldsystem, for instance, before 
the actual installation starts). Then a post-install script can go and 
grep in /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow and /home for users and put them into 
the new passwd file with new UID and GID's, fix permissions, new 
desktops, etc. Wow, this is a real good idea. I'll take it with to the 
EdUbuntu summit too and see what the people think!

-Jonathan

PS: Jane, if you're reading this, Edward is from South Africa too, and 
he's worked with us before.