ubuntu-xxx dependencies & group assignment for sound & co

[Adrian Gschwend]

Hi all,

I posted this to the users list but got no feedback so I try it again here.

We consider using Ubuntu Linux at our University on all of our x86
machines. We did evaluate the current setup and so far we are quite happy
with it. However, we do have some problems left and I am interested in
comments about it:

- we do not want to install stuff like ppp and
arabic/chinese/whatever fonts on our systems. We simply don't need it. Now
we tried to get rid of them but we noticed that those things are most of
the time a dependency in ubuntu-base or alike packages. Is there a
special reason why all of that gets installed by default? Doesn't make
much sense to me IMHO. What is the recommended way to get rid of those
packages without breaking Ubuntu or without getting them the next time we
do an update? Our disks are not that big on some machines and we have a
dualboot with Windows so disk usage matters for us.

- We authenticate our users via an LDAP & Kerberos Server. Every student
is in the LDAP directory. We also have groups in the LDAP but they are
mostly used for permissions on the home directory (which is an NFS share).
Now the questions is how can we make sure that students can mount cdroms
and play sound without being in the required groups? It wouldn't be very
comfortable to us to add each student to each of those groups. Again, I am
looking for a solution that doesn't break Ubuntu or change the next time I
do an update of it.

We think Ubuntu could be a cool step forward also because of the way we
can update it so we are not interested in breaking that :)

I am looking forward for any constructive feedback. We really appreciate
Ubuntu so far, the students that played with it were pretty happy and it's
definitely a big step forward for a Debian-based distribution! 

Thanks

Adrian
-- 
Adrian Gschwend
System Administrator
Berne University of Applied Sciences
Biel, Switzerland