Hacking Local Devices

[Jeff Casimir]

Good morning list,

I've been working on some plans to use Edubuntu in our school, but the 
lack of local device support is a deal breaker.  I know that it is a 
priority for the next release, but I am hoping to deploy machines in the 
immediate future.

I see there is a stub of a Wiki page at 
http://wiki.edubuntu.org/ThinClientLocalDevices but it doesn't have much 
commentary.  My questions are...

1) Are there known hacks/techniques to get floppys & usb disks working?  
Workable solutions that sacrifices some network/client performance or 
security are a reasonable compromise.

2) Will LTSP techniques transfer over?  I read through 
http://www.unicolet.org/linux/ltsp.html and it sounds confident.  I'm 
not a unix guru but it seems straightforward.  Any thoughts?

Thanks,
Jeff Casimir