Greetings!

["Simón A. Ruiz"]

Hi, I just joined the list yesterday, so I thought I should introduce 
myself.

My name is Simón Anibal Ruiz Rolfs, and I am the Technology Assistant at 
Bloomington High School North in Bloomington, Indiana.

Bloomington High School North recently a grant from the State of Indiana 
to create four 1:1 computing classrooms, where--every day they are in 
class--students sit down at a desk with a computer the whole time they 
are in class.

The reasoning behind this grant has to do with research findings that 
students in this 1:1 environment tend to write more and improve their 
writing more, as well as they tend to be better engaged in the 
classroom. We are finding this to be true in our school.

The State paid for 120-some computers for us to use in the classrooms as 
well as desks for them, and we paid for all the infrastructure 
modifications (i.e., electrical and data wiring).

These computers are to run Linux.

When the State sent us these computers we had the choice of using either 
Linspire, or Novell Linux Desktop 9. Our downtown (corporate) IS 
department decided we would use the Novell Linux Desktop, and has been 
too busy with their own homogenously Microsoft network duties to help us 
with this Linux-based project.

Although I've had almost no experience with Linux before this project 
was dropped in our laps, when I saw that the project would either sink 
or swim based on what we did here at the school level, I decide I wasn't 
going to let the project die from lack of support and I took the reins, 
so to speak, of making this whole thing work.

My first decision was to create a new image from scratch. Novell Linux 
Desktop came to us packed with far too much software for school use 
(there was KDE & GNOME to choose from, then OpenOffice 1.9, OpenOffice 
2.0 or StarOffice 7), and it had far too many unexplainable and annoying 
glitches (the two that come to mind most are that the desktop would 
hibernate and not wake up for anything short of a hard shutdown, and 
that it would drop to line prompt with no visible way to get back to the 
GUI).

I figured it would be easier to start from scratch and choose what we 
wanted than start with what we had and prune it down and debug it.

My natural choice was Edubuntu simply because it's target is educational 
usage. I've installed StarOffice 8 (using alien to convert the rpms to 
debs) as the only Office Suite, and begun to smooth the image down and 
set it up to work with our network more seamlessly than it was before. 
There's still a lot of work to do on this front.

The only piece of proprietary software (I guess besides StarOffice, now 
that I think about it) in the image is Norton Ghost which is the 
cornerstone of my image deployment and update system.

I've formatted and partitioned and played with GRUB and fiddled with DOS 
batch programs and Bash shell scripts to create the system we use with 
the GhostCast Server and have been able to cut down the time it takes to 
replicate the Image on a workstation from an hour and a half per 
workstation (when I first started the Edubuntu "experiment", using dd) 
to an hour and a half per classroom (when the teachers demanded Edubuntu 
over our buggy implementation of Novell Linux Desktop 9, using just the 
Norton Ghost client), to now where I can sit at my desk and type a 
couple of commands and boom, all 126 Linux Workstations are re-imaged in 
10 minutes. (It's a slight bit more complex than that, but that's the 
gist.) I make it a point to update the workstations on a regular weekly 
basis, especially if I make any progress on the image during the week

I look forward to excising Norton Ghost at some point in the future and 
replacing the system with an open-source solution, allowing me to share 
the entire image with other schools who might benefit from it. At the 
moment, there are more important problems to tackle.

Anyhow, I'm not going to bore you with all the details of my project, I 
didn't mean to go off on a tangent like that, but I did want to 
introduce myself to your community, and lurk about on your mailing list 
in case I can be of use to you or you can be of use to me.

Tambien notare que soy Venezolano por nacimiento y subscribi a la lista 
edubuntu-devel-es. Puedo entender el catellano bien, pero como no he 
estado en Venezuela por casi cinco años my vocabulario se ha atrofiado 
un poco y me cuesta recordar las palabras que necesito. Por esa razón no 
escribire un e-mail largo en esa lista para presentarme, porque no tengo 
la capacidad de comunicar muy claramente, especialmente cuando hay 
jargon tecnico.

Anyhow, glad to meet you all. I hope I get a chance to give back to this 
community, as the Edubuntu distribution does serve as the very core of 
the Linux image we use here.

P.S. Does anyone here have experience getting an Edubuntu workstation to 
authenticate against a Microsoft Active Directory? especially without 
having Administrative privileges on the Active Directory Server? I'd 
love to pick your brain if you do have experience in this area.

I tried using the "sadms" package, but it asked me to change the admin 
password on the Kerberos server, and our corporate IS department refused 
to do this for me, saying that they shouldn't need to to get this working.

I'm left to my own devices to figure out the problem, therefore, because 
they're too busy to take the fifteen minutes to explain things to me. 
And I have no experience (prior to beating my head against this problem) 
with Kerberos, LDAP, or ADS.

-- 
   ___
  (   )   Peace, Paz, Paix, Shanti, Mir, Shalom and Salaam
   \ /
 >=-Y-=<                  Simón A. Ruiz
    |                    Technology Aide
    |              Bloomington High School North
    ^