introduction

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Fri, 29 Sep 2006, Sarita Friguglietti wrote:

> Thanks to everyone that have replied so quickly. I would just like to add
> that I have read the documentation and know that 32MB is too little. That
> is why we are upgrading the memory. 

While you can upgrade the RAM, I'd guess that these machines are probably
early P2s at best (from memory, most P1s were able to boot off cdrom).
These machines will run Edubuntu but not terribly quickly -- using the XFCE
desktop might be a good idea.  

The real problem though is hard disks.  You will have issues with capacity,
but the real issue will be reliability.  These hard disks may be about 7-8
years old which means they will have a fairly short life expectancy.
That's after you ship them to RSA and a few fail en route.  Once the disks
fail, will someone have a spare disk and skills to replace it and
reinstall?

This is one of the benefits of thin clients -- hard disk failure is not an
issue.

> What I am rather more interested in is alternative ways of installing the
> software - e.g. booting up from floppy or network installation

I believe the Smart Boot Manager may be able for this.  A description is
here:

http://www.skolelinux.no/~klaus/newnotater/x1046.html
ftp://ftp.mcc.ac.uk/beta/local/teaching_cluster/disks/sbm.bin

Gavin