[Ltsp] Installation report: St. Joseph Catholic School in Ponchatoula

[Michael Murray]

The St. Joseph Catholic School installation went well. It was 
particularly handy to have Sabrina Duhe's assistance, with her 
experience as Trafton Academy's sysadmin. We brought up the server and 
four terminals easily, the only problem resulting from my attempt to 
use three 14" monitors that just wouldn't work in an X-windows 
environment. I ducked out to my nearby warehouse and brought back 15" 
replacements that came up fine; we look forward to getting some 17s 
from CACRC soon. By the time I returned, Sabrina and Mel Dressel were 
well along in setting up users and dealing with other configuration 
issues in a focused and professional manner.  We installed the printer 
without difficulty, and the system is ready for use:

Dell PowerEdge 2300 dual PII 400MHz server with 384MB RAM and two 4.5GB 
SCSI drives
Four Micron Millennia P1 thin clients with 32MB RAM and PXE-bootable 
3Com 3C905C-TXM ethernet cards
3Com 12-port dual speed hub
Lexmark 4039-10plus laser printer: has Postscript emulation for snappy 
printing

We are all feeling pleased with ourselves. Personally, I'm delighted to 
see the beginnings of a Louisiana K12LTSP user community.

The system is connected to the school's T1 line, so remote access setup 
should be a simple matter. Not simple enough for me, however, as I am 
absolutely clueless where to begin. I must again defer to the BRLUG for 
support. My competence is limited to hardware configuration and system 
installation; otherwise I'm a rank noob.

I think it would be prudent to let the school use the system for a 
couple weeks' shakedown before we contemplate changes. By that time Mel 
should be in a better position to know what issues need addressing.

We went with v3.12 on our first system because of video issues with the 
IBM 300GL terminals, and I followed suit with this install even though 
we used Micron P1 clients. Sound is important in a school environment, 
but I know from following the K12LTSP maillist that it can be 
challenging to implement, and really needs the Fedora 2-based v4.1. 
Perhaps we should consider an early upgrade at both sites. New video 
cards (I have plenty) in the IBM clients should work with the newer 
release. The upgrade should be within my capabilities, but we could use 
a competent volunteer to assist with sound configuration.

Also, Sabrina is eager to use Scribus to produce Trafton's school 
newspaper and needs help with its installation.

I'm having a lot of fun with this project. We really are turning old 
junk into some pretty slick systems, and we're just getting started.

Michael Murray