Request for help implementing Edubuntu and LTSP

[G. T. Stresen-Reuter]

Hi,

My name is Ted Stresen-Reuter. I am a web developer and IT teacher living (and working) in the Canary Islands. I started teaching middle and high school IT in September. Our computer lab has about 20 wintel boxes that are about 8 years old. At present, the computers in the computer lab are used by students of all ages: nursery school to seniors in high school. 

The general school network is all Windows with an Active Directory server and most users use the Terminal Server rather than working from their desktop. This setup is fine for most administrative duties but not necessarily for training (where students need to be able to break things and the teacher needs to be able to repair them). Also, in the computer lab we may have a wide variety of applications installed that either can't be installed on the Terminal Server or aren't appropriate there (since all users would then have access to them). In short, we're exploring ways to improve the efficiency of the computer lab and edubuntu + ltsp is a likely candidate.

The reason for this email is to see if anyone on this list can give me some pointers on setting up and maintaing an edubuntu+ltsp configuration or even answer some of our questions...

Where is the documentation for setting up groups and policies? Having such radically different users it is fundamental that we put them into groups for managing what they have access to.

Can a single user have concurrent sessions from different machines and if so, what negative side-effects does this have? I'm asking because for the youngest users it is a logistical nightmare to ask them to remember their own username and password and we'd like a single username and password we can use for all of them.

I need to run Windows games that are 10 or more years old. How well is Wine supported? On a similar note, if I install a Windows virtual machine will it have the same configuration for all users? Will video display properly running across a network via LTSP?

Can I really use Active Directory to authenticate users as described in this article? I tried following the instructions with no luck at all.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/ActiveDirectoryIntegration

Can anyone comment on their own experience in a similar situation? Should we be looking at alternative solutions (we've considered installing basic Linux distros with VMWare and making 3 Windows images available: one image for each group of students).

And finally, where else can I go for help getting this set up (logistics, not so much technical)? Most information seems to be very technical but what I'm looking for is practical help on higher-level topics (like, does ltsp make sense in my situation).

Many, many thanks in advance and to the developers for providing such a great product for FREE! I really hope this is the winning solution but need answers to these questions (and more) in order to be able to make a final decision.

Sincerely,

Ted Stresen-Reuter
http://tedmasterweb.com