Edubuntu rocking the [school]house

[David Trask]

See my notes inline below

Matt Oquist <moquist at majen.net> writes:
>We've got a pair of Edubuntu servers handling somewhere between 80 and
>100 thin clients (TCs).
>
>The following are some notes I've made on setting up Edubuntu (edgy).
>I know lots (if not all) of these points are covered on the wiki, but
>I had to find each one out after some trial and error so I put this
>list together for my co-workers (hence all the links to my own
>website -- I'm sending this almost exactly as I sent it to them).
>
>I don't recommend so much that others exactly DO everything as
>I recommend to my coworkers here, but I hope that others can learn
>from this list and/or emulate some of these things (such as the
>ubuntu-media script) for their own environments. (I make no promise
>that these URLs will remain valid.)
>
>I've been very satisfied with Edubuntu (after #3 was discovered
>a couple of days ago), and I'm hoping to switch to it (from other LTSP
>servers) soon at our HS, which has a few hundred TCs. I'll send
>another report if/when we make that transition.
>
>1. Install using the edubuntu-install CD; it sets up more-or-less
>   everything automatically.
>2. The driver necessary for the broadcom ethernet adapters in some
>   servers is not included on the install CD; this shouldn't really be
>   an issue, but if you care you can grab the broadcom driver for the
>   2.6.17-10-386 kernel from a running Ubuntu system and copy it (I
>   used a USB drive) into your system, and then insmod it. (You could
>   also grab it ATM from http://majen.net/misc/bnx2.ko.)
>3. Immediately after installation, apt-get install linux-image-generic
>   and make sure it's the default kernel in /boot/grub/menu.lst
>   (otherwise you'll only use one of your CPUs).


Did you contact Oli (ogra) about this?  Just curious as many of us use
dual-porcessor servers for LTSP servers.

>
>4. Set up /etc/ltsp/dhcpd.conf for your network.
>5. Go to http://wiki.ubuntu.com/RestrictedFormats to get media
>   working (gstreamer is recommended over xine); you can just execute
>   http://majen.net/misc/ubuntu-media if you prefer (it does all that
>   stuff automatically).
>6. Grab http://majen.net/smbldap/smbldap-installer-latest.tgz and
>   follow the instructions on http://majen.net/smbldap/ to set up
>   a Samba/LDAP server OR to configure Edubuntu to authenticate to
>   another LDAP server (talk to me if you sent up an Edubuntu server
>   to authenticate elsewhere).
>   THANKFULLY, this will no longer be necessary when Feisty is
>   released, as smbldap-tools will be integrated into the installer
>   and ajmitch's authconfig tool will be included for LDAP client
>   configuration.

Yay!
>
>7. Add all users to the fuse group so they can use USB thumb drives
>   (talk to me and we can do this with a simple script instead of
>   manually). If you're lazy (and don't have a reason NOT to do so),
>   then you might just use GID 115 (fuse) as your default group. Then
>   every user will automatically be able to use USB drives.
>8. We're using DHCP failover (see
>   http://www.madboa.com/geek/dhcp-failover/) to split the load
>   between our two Edubuntu servers, but I'm hoping to implement
>   a scripted mechanism of splitting among more application servers.
>
>The only thing this doesn't provide (to my knowledge) is Flash WITH
>SOUND on TCs. Flash itself works fine, but you can't hear it. Other
>media formats all play fine, AFAIK.

Contact Gadi (Gideon Romm) on this....he has a script to take care of
that.  I have it working fine on my installation.


David N. Trask
Technology Teacher/Director
Vassalboro Community School
dtrask at vcsvikings.org
(207)923-3100