Newbie- Installing an Edubuntu lab :)

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

I must admit I'm rather surprised that an AMD K6-500 with 128m RAM won't
run but the Xubuntu suggestion is a good one to try.  I presume it's the
RAM is the problem.  I run several ubuntu laptops very comfortably with
192MB and similar (albeit Intel) cpus so I imagine you're very borderline.
XFCE instead of GNOME might make the difference.

I _think_ you should be able to just install the xubuntu-desktop instead of
reinstalling with Xubuntu.

If you're comfortable on the command line, you could install ssh on each
and use fanterm to do 

	sudo vim /etc/apt/sources.list
	sudo apt-get update
	sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

	http://www.stearns.org/fanout/README.html#fanterm 

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Vernon Graner wrote:

> No beefy server (I wish!) "the lab was updated *only* 5 years ago!"
> (these are the words of the administration here at the school) and at
> that time they didn't see the need to replace the big white server box,
> so they left a Dual Pentium Pro 200mhz box, 128m RAM with 2x 4g SCSI
> drives in a software raid (mirror) running Windows NT4! Arg... :P

You'd be surprised how little beef you'd need.  I'd scrounge around some
companies who are replacing servers.  If you can get your hands on a late
P3 or better and stick a chunk of RAM in (in principal you can get tp to
2GB with SDRAM) you should be able to run a good number off that.  Again
the XFCE desktop will likely get you a little more per server by reduing
the RAM footprint per client.  It's probably preferable to get an old SCSI
machine with wiped disks rather than an IDE disk as I understand SCSI
will scale far better with multiple users accessing it.

If you could get sponsorship of course, I imagine $2-3K would buy you a
thin client server for all 20 and more.

Gavin