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Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs?
Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."
well not linux, but unix...I believe uw uses AIX and every student has a login...works very well for the 30,000 students.
Isn't this basically what companies like Netcom and Compuserve did? Unix systems with large numbers of unrelated users all having logins. You'll need some sort of central directory for passwords (pam_ldap or something similar should work wonders there), but otherwise it sounds like what Unix-like systems have been doing for decades.
I have setup a general access lab using linux and LTSP, but it was only for 16 highschool students, so I am not sure how relevant to your quest. I would recommend looking for studies regarding LTSP.
Well, it'd definitely be easy to set up and cheap to support, but on the downside, most of the programs people are going to want to use (at least average people) are Windows, or maybe Mac, programs. I guess having a well-installed copy of Wine might help with that, but it does seem like a major problem. Also, there would be the small hurdle of the users being a little confused by Linux, but that would go away pretty quickly.
using namespace slashdot;
troll::post();
I don't know what research has been performed, but UofM has a huge number of dual-boot (redhat/win2k) workstations around north campus which are available for general use. Mostly used by engineering students, but I suspect they've done some research on going further. Look around their website and ask their computing services people.
-Adam
Carnegie Mellon University has labs of Linux, NT, Apple, and Sun machines - all using the same login / password, and accessible to everyone.
...I can't play minesweeper? What kind of lab is this?"
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Seems like the K-12 Linux project might be a place to start looking at they have been plugged on /. before. Seems that they looked at what a student in a classroom would need and there are some articles on their site about schools implementing Unix in a educational enviroment.
JK
Its meant to be secure. It just won't work that way. You could try using an account without a password and auto login, but your using the wrong tool for the job!
$ yes >
I'm intrigued by the idea, but please clarify some activities anticipated on these computers.
I'd highly reccomend you look over at the linux k12 project @ http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/
im working on a plan to implement linux from the inside in the public schools. your battle is the same as mine, good luck
mit uses linux and solaris and irix, though they're moving away from comercial unices and towards linux on pc's almost exclusively.
Jamie Zawinski has produced a nice document describing how he did it, problems he faced, etc.
[LINK]
all 30,000+ purdue students can login to a unix shell (via telnet/ssh/pc-xware), and that works without a problem. Only students in certain classes (CS courses, mainly) have access to the labs where all the Sun machines are.
I believe that the existence of women is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy
What applications are going to be available? If it's just a library where people are websurfing, then I don't see what the big deal would be. If they're going to do a lot of office-type stuff, then I expect the big problem will be file formats. They're going to want to take their term paper or their lab results home and use them in Excel or Word, and even if the filters are available, they may be befuddled by it.
Find free books.
Any default install of Redhat on any computer with an always on connection is plenty public, i.e., anybody on the net can use them ;-)
Åbo Akademi has a few hundred pc:s running redhat-linux and win2k. Password-files and home-dirs reside on two servers. Any student can log on any computer littered around the university area. http://www.abo.fi/dc/stigoswel_eng.shtml Ask these guys about it... but beware, they don't really know what they are doing... :)
The Athena system here at MIT runs both on Sun and Linux boxes. Extensive use of certificates and kerberos here. Supposedly very secure...
Northeastern University has a kiosk system using a unix or linux, students can view info through a web based app.
The Technical University of Darmstadt had quite a few dual-boot Linux/Windows machines in public labs. This was 3 years ago so I don't know if this is still the case.
Blaze a trail to the New World
When I went to school at Indiana, they had 'public access' UNIX labs in some of the buildings around campus. Not Linux, but Solaris and IRIX. Though they were mainly geared for graphics and CS students, anyone could get an account just be applying on a web page. I think that is a good approach to getting initial interest in the Linux labs. Start small (a couple dozen machines), put productivity software, graphics and science apps on the machines. And let people begin to use them at their leisure. If your school is anything like mine was, there are always a shortage of available public PCs and you'll find that students who wouldn't normally show up at the Linux lab, will just come for the open PCs. Make sure the lab is staffed with people who can translate from Windows to Linux, and gradually you'll gain acceptance and begin to spread out the labs.
Carnegie Mellon University's Cluster services maintains general student body access Linux and Solaris machines as well as Windows and MacOS. Don't know of any studies, offhand, but it doesn't hurt to look.
Those who do not know the past are doomed to reimplement it, poorly.
Carnegie Mellon has a large network for about 5,000 current undergrads, 1,000 current graduate students, and hundreds of staffers (not to mention 'miscellaneous' accounts). Most people use it to log into Windows or Macintosh systems on campus, since that's what they're used to. Furthermore, the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible. Among other things, it completely ceases to work if NUM LOCK is on. There's been talk about switching over to GNOME as the default, but as of now people have to ask each other how to switch to Windowmaker, FVWM, or the current GNOME environment.
One time early in the academic year, I noticed a user had forgotten to log out. In the xterm that had been opened with mwm, I saw:
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% netscape
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol
bash: aol: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% aol.com
bash: aol.com: command not found
% netscape.com
bash: netscape.com: command not found
Make all the jokes you want about LARTing the newbies, but there were absolutely no options on screen. Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris. IE for Solaris is lackluster compared to Windows, Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it), GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop, and StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.
For more information, click here.
Maybe I was a bit confused by what you are asking, but if you are talking about public computer terminals, running a *nix, where all students have the ability to login and use the computer, Vanderbilt University does this. Not only are there several Windows computers on the campus that will enable any student to login and access his or her online storage space and the internet and whatever applications are available on that particular machine, but there are several iMacs and *nix (running some gui, not sure which one or what distro) computers as well. Did I completely miss the ball on this one? I only read it briefly.
Try again, all you did was make it long.
The SEUL is an organization for using Linux for education. There's even a case study section.
MIT has been running the Athena project for years now. It is used by all of the student body, in both public and course-specific computer labs. The main site, http://web.mit.edu/is/athena/, has lots of information.
I used to work at UC Irvine and my group was in charge of a public access lab where we used linux machines as X-terminals so that way people could log into any machine serving X11 sessions on the campus network.
:)
One issue that the admistration had was the users breaking into the machines. We auto-spawned X sessions and used the restrict flag in LILO (which allows no special options to be passed to the kernel at boot time e.g linux init=/bin/sh) and we never had any problems. Of course, we also patched the machines whenever there were local or remote security holes via an automated patching system.
Another good idea might be to have the machines reboot, mount a miniroot at night and copy their os partitions over from a central server, similar to what I've seen norton ghost do on windows boxen.
and of course, you can use them for the obligatory parallel computing tasks during the night
What you're describing has been the way
things have worked at MIT for the last
18 years (although with various Unixi,
now including Linux) starting with Project
Athena in the early 80's. Athena is where
we get X Windows and Kerberos.
I suspect that with this number, things have moved beyond the computer science department.
Quote from a older article:
- "The key feature of Linux is that it is very robust as a result. This means fewer crashes and problems than most other operating systems," Mr Bob Edwards, of the Computer Science Department in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, said.
ANU - also the home of Tridge from SAMBA, and the Bunyip Beowulf project (http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Beowulf/)He said the strong background in Linux at the ANU made it an ideal environment in which to become an expert programmer.
"We provide Linux laboratories for students to work on, the staff use Linux and in 2000 we won the Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest Linux machine in the world -- Bunyip," Mr Edwards said. "
Just kidding...
Well, at Columbia, they have all these dumb terminals, which run Linux and an X session. They're not bad for checkin' yer mail, but they don't allow you to do much else. For some application where the types of software needed are very limited, I think that it's prolly great.
For the real computers labs, for the non-cs types, they are mostly Windows (NT or some such) or Mac. The NT machines are pretty well locked-down and something like this would be quite easy to achieve; it would probably even be more secure (well maybe) with Linux.
I guess the real thing is choosing software. OpenOffice is alright, but I don't know if random people are actually going to want to write papers with it. I mean, I have, but...well...people might have some issues with their floppies. That's probably the biggest thing. Dang floppies.
You should really use DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, maybe Lotus 1-2-3.
The University of Texas at Dallas does it. There is a lab full of Red Hat Linux computers and Sun Ray terminals.
Though their web site is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
I think it would be a great idea- especially if the Labs ran something easy to use like KDE. As for desktop publishing I use Openoffice and it is great and is cross platform and free! It saves to XML so printing your files from any machine is a snap.
The only downside is that KDE or Gnome run like slugs so it will probably load in similar time to Windows.
But hey it is a whole heap more stable! (and free!)
You have an advantage in that there are less Linux viruses for your users to inflict on the system, and less 'BonzaiCometGators' as well. This situation could well change in the near future though, as viruses like simile are now cross-platform...
Score:-1, Funny
She's your average windows user, don't ask her about hardware or drivers she just wants browse the web etc.
She had no trouble logging in through kdm.
she had no trouble using the default kde3 setup. All this with no help from me (i wasn't even watching)
She can check her email, browse the web, listen to music and print stuff out (thanks cups + kdeprint).
A couple of months went by, I haven't watched her use it at all...
I asked her the other day, so how do you like linux?
her answer: "It's just like using windows" and "I like the way it looks".
Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.
Liberty.
We also had pretty fast access to the internet - no port blocking; too many Mud players (me included) and a few Muds that ran on school property (eventually went away; cool admin left). Man, those were nthe days.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
You may want to check out MIT's project Athena (Academic Computing at MIT). They have been using UNIX machines for the student-wide computing environment which includes all different kinds of applications (word processors, spreadsheets, CAD software, scientific applications, programming environments, instant messenging). There is also a Linux and a NetBSD version of the Athena environment.
I haven't been following the developments but I believe they were looking into introducing more Linux machines in the computer labs and enriching the Athena environment by adopting GNOME.
Perhaps some current MIT student can provide more information.
Here's some links:
An overview
A dated article from the MIT student newspaper.
An FTP server where you can download the Athena software (MIT license)
MIT's Athena computing environment runs on Dell Linux boxes, Sun workstations, and a few IRIX machines, and accounts are granted to all students. These *nix machines, with the exception of a small media cluster, are the only public machines available.
There's a small library near my office where there are four public access terminals. Historically they all ran Windows, but just for a laugh the sysadmin put Linux on one of them; and the users avoided the Linux machine like it was radioactive. They didn't seem to like the "weird" web browsers that it came with (Opera and Mozilla), and they had a hard time adapting to the application launcher, however trivially it seemed to differ from the Windows "Start" button. Non-technical people prefer familiarity and ease of use above all else when using a computer.
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
For more than 10 years, practically all university students have gotten a UNIX login, and universities have been full of public terminals for students in labs and in hallways. In some richer universities, they have even had *oooh* X-terminals.
The machines have usually been Sun, but I don't think Linux would be overwhelmingly different from them...
So forgive me if I don't quite understand the question. UNIX has been a feasible solution for all students for years, and there's little reason to believe Linux wouldn't be.
The TCC (Tech Computer Center) has every workstation set up to boot into either win95 (the school has no funding to upgrade) or a semi-custom flavor of Linux. The Linux works well, except for the fact that you have to know how to use SaMBa to print from Linux...
Also, to type papers or anything office related, one has to use windows....
It works well, but would work better if anyone cared to allow easy printing under Linux...
Linux is dead.
LU
The Carleton University EngSoc Project is a wholly student-owned and student-run UNIX network at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Once the largest Linux userbase in the world, they've provided Linux shell accounts to every undergraduate Engineering student for at least 7 years.
Since 1996, they've offered a Public Access Lab using donated hardware and space provided by the University. They started off using 486 machines that booted RedHat 3 and NFS mounted from a blazing P90. Then they moved on to using NCD X-Terms. In 1998, Corel Computer donated Netwinder systems for use as the PAL workstations. In 2000, the lab sustained water damage from construction on the roof, and the Netwinders were replaced with ThinkNIC thin clients.
But we don't have any useful literature to provide.
My university uses this already in the Agora (Lakehead U, ON). Pretty popular workstations, and very stable.
The University of Cambridge have a system called the public workstation facility. This is comprised of machines in many departments and colleges which can authenticate against a single database, and which provide homespace and so on. I understand that some of these machines are now dual boot between NT/win2k and a home grown linux. More infomation is here.
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
1) Use Mandrake. Its the simplest install, and in an educational setup the extra apps that it has can be beneficial, also, due to the wide range of users, having all of Mandrakes bloat can help people find programs that they will find useful.
2) Use KDE/GNOME. Ideally, set it up to boot into X, have KDE/GNOME both installed and the users can select the one they want.
3) Lock down permissions tighter than a Vatican nun.
These tips will produce a perfectly usable system, fairly sturdy against morons trying to(or accidentally) screw up the system or introduce viruses or what have you. And make sure to review the logs, paying special attention to those who use the root account, either with su or by directly logging in
I don't know, at first this seems like the perfect place for Linux. It's inexpensive, morally superior, the list goes on.
But this is a situation where Linux's power might be its undoing. In the physical presence of a Linux box, it is trivial for someone with the proper experience to boot into single-user mode, change the root password, and bam. Suddenly they are sitting in front of the most powerful hacking machine available outside the Pentagon.
Result? Linux gets to be associated even more with hacking, and the spooks start taking an interest in our favorite OS (Linux). And that is some scruteny we don't want, thanks.
In this context, I think shelling out for Windows is the best bet.
Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
Everybody knows that the Vandy football program sux too much to financially support a computer network!
The public computer labs in my university already do this. They dual boot windows and mandrake, but I see more people who just log into KDE rather than reboot into windows.
pmj
Are you BioCurious?
Didn't Al Gore invent the internet there while he was getting baked?
First England for victory post!!
SMASH THE ARGENTINE SCUM!!
Three lions on the shirt.
The University of Bonn has labs full of computers running SuSE. I was there a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how the students liked it, but after a look at the setup it seemed it was probably much easier to administer. Most people only used the lab for the web.
cytrix has a software package to connect to a win2k server...its basically a fancy fancy vnc server/client software set.
So the idea is you need to do productivity stuff...you fire up the virtual desktop from a central win2k server..and view it on the lab computer.
So know you only have to maintain that one central win2k server ( its 2 backups ) instead of a whole lab of windows machines.... of course the licensing issues in this are um...interesting.
-jef
I used to work in the WAM and GLUE labs when I was an undergrad at UMCP, and the folks that managed the systems were pretty friendly, if you can get contact info for the current WAM sysadmins, they can probably give you better pointers. In the mean time, there is a page giving useage statistics for the WAM/GLUE cluster.
Here at MIT, there is a system in place that allows access to any public machine for anybody with credentials. All remote software is under /mit, with homedirs being /mit/user/.../.../xxx. Authentication is Kerberos, remote filespace is AFS. It's called Athena. It's available for Solaris, Irix and Linux, with Solaris and Irix being phased out. Basically it's a RH system with a boatload of custom rpms. Some of the neater ones do auto-updating, so that you can go from a RH6.2 based Athena system to RH7.1 based overnight, no intervention required. Since all user data is remote, it works great. We(biology,biomicro,bioinformatics) are taking this system and making it more usable. A kickstart script gets the latest RH plus updates for installation. Homedirs and maintenance dirs are on nfs, and with kickstarts %postinstall section, a system can be customized perfectly right during install. I recommend this route, as you can add any rpms you want to be installed, and any scripts that you want executed.
Do you see the sig? Do you have it in your sights? Why yes, Miss Moneypenny...
check out www.k12LTSP.org. these guys have been doing all sorts of labs for the Portland, OR area schools..
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
The key words your searching for are:
Large Scale Linux
There are many tools, special conferences,
ect. ect..
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proc
The public Computer rooms at the University of Zurich and the e-learning facilities are controlled by Linux and - still - AIX. There are plans to migrate the whole lot to Linux (the public Computers are Mac and PC and will remain that due to the wishes of students). The main reason of still using AIX is the possiblity to index the passwd (nearly 40'000 accounts!) and the better performance of a big IBM server. But this should be managed by a Linux cluster in future.
Details:
http://www.access.unizh.ch and http://www.zi.unizh.ch
(in German but you'll find contacts there).
it may be a troll, but he has a damned fine point.
Linux is dead.
LU
Our college computer room has mainly Windows boxes, a couple of Linux ones, and also a couple of clapped-out Suns running a tty on the console.
The geek students - generally those reading computing science, or sometimes physics, will try the Linux ones for browsing, ssh-ing to another account for email, or opening X-clients (often Matlab) from other machines, and the Suns if they only need to ssh to one other account. If all are taken, they'll open PuTTY on a Windows box.
The majority of students want to do one of three things:
(i) Read email, (ii) Browse the web, (iii) Print out reports/essays
Up till a few years ago, anyone wanting email had to get a shell account and use pine/mutt. Now there is a web-based interface (WING - yuck), and so as far as these students are concerned, (i) falls under (ii).
These students will gravitate towards the windows boxes in order to use IE (for purposes i and ii), or Word (iii). If all the windows ones are taken, they will take a look at the Linux ones - Debian running wdm. Some will not be able to operate the wdm login widget (especially if some joker has left the Action pull-down menu set to something other than Login). Those that do will be confronted by WindowMaker, and click around a bit until they find the root menu.
Those wanting to write/print essays will see the absence of Word, and so more are put off at this point. Some find WordPerfect, and discover that their files can sometimes be read, and may even be able to operate the ``Print'' button, and click ``OK'' in the resulting dialog box without trying to fiddle with the printer settings. Most are put off by the differences with Word, and never use it again.
Those wanting to browse the web/check their email will have a similarly fruitless search for IE, and go for Netscape. (The root menu has an entry labelled ``Mozilla - better Netscape'', which is ignored by all). Again, they are confused that Netscape doesn't look the same as it does under Windows, but normally manage to find their way around.
They will attempt Ctrl-Alt-Del to log out, and notice it does nothing. Some will notice the Exit option on the root menu, and successfully log out. Others will happily leave the machine logged in. (The sysadmin had to remove the wiring behind the power-switch on the front of the box to prevent idiots from rebooting when they couldn't log out, or when Netscape crashed.)
Where was I going with this? Ermm... Oh yes. People will stick to what they know, and the less the new machine is like what they know, the more likely they are to be scared off using it. Those with no computing experience (the ones that haven't been exposed to Windows - yes, there are some) would be quite happy to learn shell-commands, like they did five years ago. Those that have been brought up using Windows will not be able to cope with the slightest difference they might encounter when confronted with a Unix box, and will soon reach the decision that the box is fucked-up. Several times I have been in and used a Linux machine while people were waiting for a Windows one to become free.
Well, at ISU, they do the Krb4/Krb5/OpenAFS/Hesiod thing, so everyone has a krb login, a home dir in afs space, and account info in hesiod. Where I worked my supervisor and myself (mostly him) set up a lab full of linux boxes that would authenticate against the krb servers (with PAM), grab AFS tokens, and the whole shebang worked pretty darn well.
;)
I've played w/ it some on my own time and its not terribly hard to set up the very same services on a linux box, although I can't claim to have been host to large numbers of users
On a side note, I've been messing w/ a custom login authenticator plugin and a hesiod-ified NetInfo that I put togther and can do the same thing with my OS X box. One day I may even finish it... If anyone else is interested, gimme a holler and I'll work more on it - have been letting it languish for a wee bit.
cheers,
luphus
at the university of buffalo, they have a common username / password for their windows and unix systems (solaris). available terminals are sun boxes (including ones running windows emulators), dumb terminals, and pcs...
From my distant memories of the dummy terminals at the University of North Dakota's CS department, one person starting a series of forked processes can leave a big hurt on everyone. Not that the setup would be anything like the server-terminal configuration at UND, or that there won't defenses against such problems... but users will find, either directly or indirectly, ways to at least take down individual systems down due to the freedom that such systems have to allow to be useful to a general audience.
That said, Windows and other public systems have all these problems too. If you've ever been in a general student computer lab more than a few times, there's just going to be dead systems every few dozen chairs. You're still going to want to scan any writable medium you've used on the system for malicious programs before you use it after bringing it home, and there's still just going to be problems with the configuration acting differently than even experienced users expect.
The only way I can see to truly prevent many types of problems in a public setting would be to not allow user executables, have a limited interface for most users, and logically ensure that at no path along the bootup, use, and shutdown of a system can a user do anything outside of expected things with the system. That means no boot-from-CD or disk, no systems with access to BIOS settings on bootup, etc, until after login to ensure security - which is likely not possible with most hardware.
Anyway, I have no suggested solution - just issues I see with any public system, including Linux ones. They're not big issues either, considering that most public systems now seem to work fine with their limited security. But not all the advantages touted for Linux will be automatically present in a public system!
:^)
Ryan Fenton
At UMBC, all public labs (whether in the CS building, or in dorm) with intel machines dual boot linux / windows. While this is a great thing, you'll only see the occasional CS major perl hacking in linux, while everyone else pretty much never strays from the windows 'option'. At least it's a step in the right direction, and supported by the OIT help desk.
As others have pointed out, for the basics it's no big deal. RTF covers a multitude of sins in the document translation world.
Where I used to live, the local library's public systems were (afaik still are) run on Win98. They were hideously unstable (Netscape had a habit of locking out input and requiring restarts). Where I live now, the libraries run Win2k; it's still Windows, but at least it works.
I suggested to the librarians a couple of times that they could run Linux, but both of the tech librarians that I knew were unfriendly and bitchy types, and one of them I got into a heated argument with over a small issue of file translation. Pretty typical of the entire fscking town, if you ask me...
/Brian
Colorado School of Mines has a *very* limited number of Linux PCs available in the open labs. Unfortunately, there's not a whole lot of support.. many of the C.S. kids even avoid our Linux labs in favor of the NT machines! --Fools! I don't know how they do it.
The University of Notre Dame and University of Michigan both use an AFS/Kerberos set-up for large volumes of accounts.
Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.
MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).
In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.
With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.
Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.
For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library, in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).
UT was established in 1794
UTexMex was established long after after UT, UTK, UTC, UTM, etc.
They were the first to require every student to have a PC and just won a IBM Linux mainframe. If anyone knows, they do!
The DNA Lounge, a night club in San Francisco, uses public terminals running linux. He has his source code on the website for the club.
http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/
I haven't had too many problems swapping back in forth. At home I use the copy of star office that came with mandrake 8.0 and I have not had any problems with word documents, and the only excell problem I have had was with the curve fit option in calc. The curve fit thing just stopped working, but all of fields and all of my data ported back and forth between me and my lab partner without a hitch. I have heard that there are some fancy features that star office fscks up, but so far the only office file I couldn't open with Star, I couldn't open with M$ office either.
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
See? Laugh now! HAHAHA!
the university of tuebingen (germany) uses linux for their computer pools and some of their servers. They are using linux clients, with kerberos authentification and a home on an afs-server.
if you have a question i guess you could send an
email to beratungatzdv.uni-tuebingen.de.
cheers TheSegfault
If you haven't already started down the *linux path, you should
seriously look into FreeBSD. It's much easier to install and manage.
http://www.oit.duke.edu/clusters/type/linux.html
Columbia has a number of "ColumbiaNet Kiosk Stations," all of which run Linux, located in the lobbies of nearly every building. The information services department (AcIS) here provides a little bit of information about the kiosks online, but it's nothing to help you get your own set of stations started.
AcIS has some info on its site regarding what software the kiosks are running (Linux 2.2.2 with XFree86 3.3.3 and Window Maker 0.52), but the interface they have isn't just regular Window Maker. They run something that looks home-made; it runs a web browser (Netscape 4.x) and lets you print to any printer on the network, but it doesn't let you access the command line. It seems pretty secure (i.e. users can't tamper with the system, aside from unplugging it), but I recall that you can still get to the console with Ctrl+Alt+Fn.
These stations are easy to use and generally stable. Most of the problems that occur with them involve hardware failures.
University of North Texas has a great kiosk setup around campus with no logins. They also have login terminals in the labs. Very kickin' setup i think.
Everyone here has login access. Mainly because you can get your email through pine, but everyone sets it up through outlook anyways. The only problem with letting everyone have access to the sun machines is that when it comes time for them to actually have to login, many of them have forgotten their passwords, and have no clue on how to use a non graphical interface. One of my roomates had this problem this past year, but had to get onto the system to get his phyc. study schedule. I think that giving everyone access is a good idea, and it also forces people to learn how to use linux.
- The project started at 1983, probably the earliest among similar projects
- http://web.mit.edu/olh/Welcome/intro.html gives a good description of the history and the system itself
Although Benanov might have only wanted info about american universities, I risk it. At Helsinki University of Technology we've got Solarices, W2K/XP and linuxes at public-access computer-classes (for more info, http://www.hut.fi/atk/luokat/ , finnish only sorry). The actual labs run on different operating systems, cs-labs run mostly Solaris and IRIX, industrial engineering and management-labs Windows 2000. Although I can't say for sure, I'd wager that some of labs do actually run linux.
We use a UNIX based method of accessing the email system here at St. Louis University as well as a web based interface. Although most tend to enjoy the web interface more, almost all are able to utilize the UNIX interface and call up pine to read their mail. Not many seem to mind too much.
"If nothing else, value the truth."
Here at North Carolina State University, we've been doing this for years. Most of the public labs are either Sun boxes or Windows machines (or a combination, usually). The Sun boxes are just a simple xdm login that brings up a terminal and a mouse activate menu, but you can change to pretty much any windown manager. More recently, we've integrated Linux into our engineering labs.
It all works pretty well. Most people do fine on the Unix boxes, but the Windows machines are there when you need them.
Unfortunately, I don't know of any usability studies off the top of my head, but I'm sure you can find some (isn't Google's university search great?).
-Alex
As has been pointed out, there are many successful projects using remotely-booted or individually installed computers, a pro-bono student project is now obsolete, but it probably contributed its share in establishing acceptance for free software at TU Wien: the project substituting it (LIZ) is a linux-only solution, it is now impossible to boot windows - compatibility for the terminally addicted is provided via a Citrix Metaframe server farm.
And likewise UMBC has a similiar if not
identical cross platform implementation
for student remote and local use.
description of some of the systems.
http://www.gl.umbc.edu/hardware.shtml
All I can say is who are these idiots that
ask slashdot while claiming that they have
done research, when they don't even appear
to have even thought about the question.
It make me really wonder about the validity
and intent of the question.
Right now the public computer labs here are W2K and Mac's with a few public unix labs. No one uses the unix labs except engineers and cs guys. Most people don't use the Mac's unless all the windows machines are occupied. So I think among the general student population you're gonna have a hard time getting people using Linux unless a) they are forced to or b) you provide training to incoming students on how to use it and see thats its incorporated into classes.
At the Australian National University ldap is used by everybody: staff and students. All of the Computer Science labs (which are a mixture of linux and sunrays) authenticate against ldap, which works pretty well. So do the PCs and Macs lying around the place, but I couldn't say how this works (don't know if they have an intermediate server which talks to ldap on their behalf, or if they can auth. directly against ldap). I can't find the link to the network info page, but essentially each faculty has an ldap server which provides login details (shell, etc), and a toplevel ldap server (I think there are a few of these) is used for authentication. Each time a user authenticates, however, the faculty server checks with the toplevel server and caches the result for some period of time, to reduce load at the top level. Of course, this creates a hell of a problem when the toplevel servers go offline :)
We use RedHat Linux + openafs and some configuration changes. Our packages are available at kickstart.linux.ncsu.edu . All of our beowolf clusters are running Scyld Linux, which is based off of RedHat Linux.
When i went to school (1993-1998). Every student at the University of Victoria had unix login accounts to machines that they could telnet to and use "mail" or "pine" to access their email. As time progressed, more and more people stopped logging in via telnet, and instead used the pop3 capabilites.
Every student that registers has a account that works on WMUs vms, unix cluster, and public solaris machines. This is a seperate network from the computer science department. It is great going to any lab and being able to use my favorite OS.
If you're really serious about this, try this hole in the wall
You might want to configure a wiki to give people a persistent platform on which to post their views and organize their information.
phpwiki can even organize wiki pages into community calendars.
Go for it!
I run my own community wiki as my part for defeating the bandwidth whores and content killing IP pimps at their own game.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I think one of the most important thing is to have tools cloning PCs (whatever OS). Whoever managing the Lab will not want to do *real* setup for tens of PCs.
I donno, does Ghost work with Linux?
If there exists such kind of tools, then the "implementation feasibility" is good.
It rocks and is very MS compatible.
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
have you considered unbreakable linux
There's your answer fishbulb
When I was at RPI ('92 to '96) every student (well over 5000) was on the Unix network. The vast majority of the machines on campus were Unix. (There were a few windows & other OS rooms scattered around.)
:)
Most of the machines were Sun and RS/6000.
It worked well for us. It should work now, too.
it's interesting.
We moved our 15 year old son to a SuSE distribution last year. He had issues because he wasn't sure how to get to his network drives and couldn't get Starcraft running, but after a couple months he was able to install Wine and get Warcraft going (didn't get Starcraft going, much to his dismay).
Four months ago we moved our 8 year old daughter to the same SuSE distro - took away her Windows 98 and made her quit cold turkey. We configured KMail and let her go. She's had NO help and she can create documents, print web pages, browse, and runs some of the KDE games. No complaints from her at all.
So can people get used to it? Even non-geeks? Sure. If an 8-year old child can do it, I would think a college student, regardless of their general computer competency, should be able to do it as well.
I don't have a solution, but I certainly admire the problem.
Not every college student has a computer, and not every computer is a laptop, and not every laptop has a wireless LAN card (though the latter's become affordable, if the college has the access points). The jobs of an open lab have changed a lot from the days when most work was on terminals connected to a big shared machine, and they'll keep changing as technology changes the affordability and portability of the average student's computing resources, and y'all in the academic-staff business will have to keep hopping, reinventing yourselves, and getting new budgets approved.
So what are they for now?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
UT Dallas has had Redhat machines running in one of their labs for a while now. I only use them when I need to get to a floppy drive though. Damn Sun Rays don't have floppy drives :(
Northern Illinois University was considering implementing Linux in its computer labs. It even got to the point that they hired a specialist to start working on implementing it. Unfortunately, there were some problems with the highers-up, and the project got axed.
Now they're moving to XP, but sticking with Novell for logins and application distribution. Considering the fiasco they had involving Novell's ZenWorks during the Spring semester, I'm not quite sure which part of that combination is the weakest link.
cytrix is still only alowing you to use a windows environment. the only positive side is that it's easy to maintain. the downside is that scalability is there only to a certain extent. besides, you still have to have an operating system running on the terminal for it to work anyways... its not the same as having a thin client. This means you have to maintain the computers in the labs anyways... making nothing left to gain. Although, if you have a bunch of outdated macs, and you want to make a simple win - based lab, but don't have the money in the budget for 30 new computers, this might be the way to go... just a thought
Be a man! View at -1
acm.cs.uwec.edu
Since there were no mails regarding USC, I thought I would just add one. :)
Here at USC, the public labs here are filled with three kinds of computers - Win2k, MacOS (sadly no OS X), and Solaris (sadly no Linux).
The sad thing about this all is that except for assignments, everybody uses Win2k/MacOS for regular work. This is sad, and nobody tries using Solaris. They have no other window managers installed also, except CDE. And CDE is not that easy to use for newbies which keeps them away from it.
The ppl who use linux have their own laptops/desktops, and use it from home.
Of course, there are people who are always found on Solaris machines even for regular work! Ppl like me
I have found a solution to Riemann's Hypothesis, but have run out of spac
Did the same here for my GF, she (like most users I know) only want to check mail, browse, maybe chat, listen to music, etc and know almost nothing about computers.
She logs in, using a very modified FVWM under FreeBSD (low RAM, fast and rock solid), she has like 5 options--that's it! I gave her a user name and password. I did not have to explain or demo anything--now that is a desktop! Keep It Simple Stupid =)
The fewer the options, the better. She can do just about everything with only the mouse. And if she gets goofed-up, or an app doesn't act right, she has a "panic button" which makes things just like she just logged in.
Even when she is at my pad, with all my various boxen, she knows to turn the monitor on, log in and go. Some people don't want to learn more about computers. (shudder)
I think alot of admins assume the user wants more, when really the user is usually happy when it's minimal and easy. Of course, YM(&GF)MV. =)
.:[MiE-g0nk]:.
You must mean feasible.
My university provides every single one of the 30000 students as well as faculty with a single logon that works on WinNT/2k, Mac, and Sun Sparc Stations.
In fact, there are several Sparc stations in each lab and I use them for browsing and email while waiting for a windows machine for 3D Studio.
They're pretty easy to use, and everything that a non-comp sci major would not need is not prominent. Email, Web Browsing, Text editing are all simple prominent buttons. Even changing your personal preferences, backgrounds, etc. is simple.
I'm out of my mind right now, but feel free to leave a message.....
Here in Brazil, our best Computer Science University uses Linux Red Hat (6.2,7.0 and 7.2) and Windows NT4 in labs. The servers are SunOS with NFS, YPserver, Samba, SSH and others. It runs well and almost 50% use Linux for non-programming things like surf the web, etc...
They've recently changed the libraries machines OS from Windows to Linux (Autologin and Netscape). Most of people don't care (I think that was because the browser was always Netscape).
Aside of that, If you want it to work fine and people use it, use something that will NOT SHOCK THEM, like KDE3, Gnome or IceWM(if you don't have a good computer) and pre-configure it in a cool way: a menu with things that matter first, desktop icons and some explanation of the basic programs(like mozilla, kmail, evolution, konqueror, galeon).
If you have some processing power, get some cool theme, like Liquid for KDE3(the best), Acqua or Luna (looks like WinXP).
I recommend you to introduce Evolution, Nautilus, Galeon, Kmail, Konqueror and Mozilla first, they're all easy to use.
The server could handle it using NFS and ypserver.
The Technical University of Vienna switched from dual-boot (Linux/Windows) to Linux only installations in all their computer labs.
One of the reasons for this (apart from costs) was that current Windows versions are obviously not suitable for diskless workstations.
Beware, above links lead to pages in German.
The University of Western Australia provides general student accounts on a Debian Linux server.
We have been running Debian Linux for at least five years, probably longer. I still remember the days when email is read with PINE and you surf the web with LYNX.
So its definitely doable.
... then install jabber; that way u get all IM services, not just AIM.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
The new library here has Sun installed on all the floors of the library, actually it seems more so then the Windows installs. Also, the entire library has 15-17" flatscreens. Pretty cool.
Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.
Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net. You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation. Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).
Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site are relevant for a desktop as well.
One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I work for a biotech startup http://www.systemsbiology.org, when we first started 2 years ago we made everyone use linux, nobody complained, because there were no options offered. They got KDE1 + StarOffice 5.2. Everything was great until politics happened and windows creepd in. Now you can choose to have windows or linux, and all linux machines are usabel by everyone. Works very well if for using common servers, common computers and letting other people use your workstation.
Keating, a Republican, said the legislation would violate the U.S. Constitution's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
"This bill provides an unnecessary and arguably unconstitutional punishment of surgical castration for second offenses of the type covered by the bill," Keating said in a brief statement to the legislators. "A more effective way of dealing with these offenders is to make certain they remain incarcerated."
Last month, the state's Legislature sent Keating the measure that would have allowed judges to sentence certain rapists to surgical castration or to "chemical castration" in which they are forced to take medication that greatly suppresses their sex drive.
The measure would have called for chemical castration of sex offenders for rapes proven by DNA evidence. Under the bill, offenders who commit sex crimes a second time could be sentenced by a judge to the surgical removal of the testicles by a physician.
In his response to the Legislature about the veto, Keating noted that he had signed a bill that allowed for repeat sex offenders to be given life in prison without parole.
"With this legislation Oklahoma is making a very strong statement that those who rape and prey and commit repeated sexual offenses will spend the rest of their lives in prison," Keating said, adding that was a more sensible measure than the castration legislation.
A month or so back I had the unenviable joy of being stuck in Brighton Hospital for a while... Discovered they have machines advertising "www.pienetworks.com" in their cafe area, running Galeon, fvwm{2,95}, just one mouse button, C-A-f1 disabled... the works. Nice to see non-windoze OSs making it into public access terminals.
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
We had our own computer centre (for non CS students) at IIT Kanpur since a long-long time. They run mostly NFS with HP-UX an Solaris servers. It's really cool to have 24-hour on-campus access to a place running Linux isnt it ;-) ? IMHO , public access linux centres help to create more *nix awareness in the community, and aid tremendously in open source development by non-CS hackers.
.... Is there supposed to be a signature here ???
University of Münster, Germany:
:-) :-)
Some time ago I went into our library in search for a specific book.
I did not find it, so I went to one of those computers that are in there to use the web-search (www.uni-muenster.de/ulb).
I sat down at one computer and noticed a *really* ugly user interface. Everything in gray, a really ugly task panel at the bottom.
"Typical Windows 95 crap. God, I love my KDE desktop", I thought.
Netscape was running.
I navigated to the search site, typed in the title and the author of the book, clicked "Search" and... woh. Netscape not responding. Freeze.
"Windoze sucks", I thought and hit CTRL-ALT-DEL.
Nothing happened.
"Shit. Windoze _really_ sucks". I clicked "Start" and then "Programs", but the only application listed was Netscape (the computers there are meant to be only for internet search).
No chance to get an explorer window, a task manager, or something else.
I thought: "How nice would it be if this were a Unix box. I would hit CTRL-ALT-ESC and kill netscape and everything would be fine. But this fucking windoze...".
My finger already was on the way to the power button when I noticed something strange...
... Doesnt Windows have a WHITE mouse cursor?
This one was black, just like on my Linux box.
I had a deeper look at the Start button.
Mmhhh. Somehow this Start button was looking wierd, strange. The proportions just seemed not right.
Another deeper look at the window decorations. Looked almost like Windows, but "almost only".
I got this strange feeling that I was being fooled...
I hit CTRL-ALT-ESC. The mouse cursor turned into a death head. I clicked on the netscape window, killed it, clicked Start->Programs->Netscape, and everything was fine again.
That "fucking windoze box" in fact was a Linux box, running fvwm95 or something like that (icewm perhaps?).
And I, using Linux everyday at home, did not notice...
OpenMind. OpenFuture. OpenSource !
If they *really* need windows. You might consider something like win4lin.
If you're looking for something that's low cost to admin, have you looked at Sun Ray?
There are numerous Universities out there using Sun Ray.
We are in the process of replacing Windows bases kiosks with Linux. We were finding it is far too easy to destroy a windows installation, even when locked down to the point of being unusable. (We even went so far as to fabricate a plexiglas cover to block the control keys, f keys, and number pad.) We have not had a single problem with the Linux machines. We even had one set up as a survey kiosk, with a standard unprotected keyboard.
The main difference is that everything in Linux must be turned on, from Ctrl-Alt-Delete on up. Also, at least with RedHat, anything that requires mucking with the system through the X interface also requires the Root password.
If you are looking for some tips on how to set up a lab, and what sort of policies to enforce, the Unix System Administrator's Handbook is chock full of really nifty practical tips and anecdotes. I use my copy daily.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
At uni (UK) we use win98% for open areas and 2K for hardcore stuff (gfx/MM etc). Its a nightmare. 1 in 5 98 boxes in the library are down at any one time, the others are full of crap downloads, dodgy wares and the inevitable virus or two. not to mention M$OUTLOOK!! doh Unless you have root you cant trash a linux installation with a few keystrokes. This Virus hoax caused havok http://forum.channel4.com/forums/forum.cgi?forum=c 4news&action=article&topic=1023273859a19320&articl e=1023273859a19320&offset=0
as did registry access via the old-style Morpheus client. A UNIs bandwith is like a hacker magnet.
surely Linux is better siuted to this unpredictable environment than 98.
As for compatability. What is to stop a uni burning CDs with openOffice, gimp etc for Win32 to distribute at enrolment.
Better than the bizzarre mix of pirate or old versions of MSoffice or whatever else students may have and hoping for compatability.
and avoiding the macro virus issue.
the Linux UI is 100% confugurable, but if its not configured its a nightmare.
It would require some time and testing but its not hard to beat a GUI that makes you press the START button to turn the computer off - thus the unevitable problems from users hitting the power button, then the next user skipping scandisk
Another consideration is wether your hardware will run post 2000 versions of windows? If not, when 98/ME stops shipping you will have to live without updates, security fixes, drivers and support from whoever you pay to install the machines. If the machine wont run XP, the boxes in your lab are scrap or Linux boxes.
As for other examples of large scale linux implimentation you may wish to look to Brazil, Germany or Peru for established state research - or Mexico as how not to do it.
http://pimientolinux.com/peru2ms/
This perpetual motion machine Lisa made is a joke, it just keeps getting faster and faster. - Homer
As mentioned above, CMU does have a single cross platform logon across campus. One of the nice things they have done with Linux is develop "Andrew Linux" which can be installed over the network with a floppy disk. Once installed, the user does not have to worry about patches, as the Computing Services department has professionals which maintain the software. The workstations run some programs, pckg and depot, or something like that, which do the updates. Users can even set up prefs to determine which apps are stored locally, and which are run over the network. fvwm is in beta testing now, but that doesn't keep people from using wmaker or sawfish or whatever they want. It won't work in the public labs though (afaik). We struggle pretty hard to support alot of different OS's, and I think we do it fairly well.
People Use windows apps because that is what they are given in their "labs" or at their home, if the University makes the change they will all eventually just learn to use the applications on the computers on the labs or they will be forced to drive to their homes and use their own windows boxes. Besides that It has been well proven that You can get many of your windows apps to run under linux just fine only using the wine libraries.
I agree that most people that use the labs mainly browse the web. having at least half of the lab running linux with something like KDE 3.0 and using Konqueror for the browser would be a sinch for anyone to figure out and then you would have greater security and protection from all of the web, viruses and such.
IT Would Work.
Licencing issues are actually quite easy, each connected client will require a client access licence and an Office licence at the very least, then you need to sort out the Citrix licencing. Even if you use VNC instead of Citrix you still have to pay Microsoft plenty.
This is a good idea for many reasons, but it won't be cheap and still involves using large amounts of M$ second-rate crudware.
In the first place, Who in the world acutally uses all of the features in MS Office, 1% of the US populace, 99% are either Just using it to View Documents or using the very basic features, ie... Bold Underline Italics etc... as long at the app will open a word or excell or powerpoint document and then allow them to edit it, you are just fine.
Here at the UCF, we don't have Linux PC, but we have a good number of iMacs that come with IE and MS office. You don't even need a student account to use these iMacs. Still, during the end of semester rush, people would wait to use the PC instead of doing their reports in the iMacs. It goes to show that one being on a institution of higher learning doesn't mean he's open to learn new things...
All students can access resources in a Linux environment with dual-boot systems. The majority have both installed and the same user name is used in both environments. Typically, CS/IT students use boot up in Linux but if all wanted to, the campus infrastructure supports it. In fact, the computer catalogs for the library are strictly running Red Hat versions of Linux.
While I was attending Stuyvesant, they had a mix of AIX and linux machines, with mostly centralized logins. Most of the school used pine or mutt for email ;)
Linux is better than windows. It was designed for multiuser from the ground up. You log in, and you have access to your files, and only your files (with permissions you can modify this, but most lab users won't need to share files anyway). With windows you log in, and you get access to all locally stored programes and files. Want to mess up the comptuer, guess what, Windows give you the rope to hang everyone. Linux only gives root enough rope to hang everyone.
If you have kids, then linux is all the more important. Adults will mostly just use the comptuer for what they want to do. kids will often do their best to destroy the computer. Linux gives you enough protection that kids generally can't destroy the comptuer (if they get good, then openBSD is an option)
I remember high school. Kids all over doing their best to ruin the comptuer system. There was always someone wanting to do a format of whatever disk could be found. Always someone trying to delete critical applications.
Windows is based on a trust model. Macs are the same (I've not worked with OSX though) Linux is assumes that you don't trust yourself. Linux is the only way to go for public machines.
Essex of uni has had 2 SuSE labs for a while now as far as I know and theres nothing to stop any student logging on, as long as they have a uni netwrok user name and pass. But not a great deal of people know about them or use them, infact I think they are closing one.
I use GIMP all the time for all graphical purposes and I can honestly say that it is everything Photoshop is and more. It may be hard to use and get around, and may look simple to some people, but I can assure everyone that it is extremely complex, and when you know how to use it, it becomes very useful.
Moreover, Staroffice, essentially, is EVERYTHING MS Office is. The only major thing lacking is the grammar check, but if you have GOOD grammar (like you're supposed to) you shoulden't have much of a problem. It seems almost that the designers of StarOffice didn't WANT their supervisors to find out about the functions they implemented, and many of them are hidden deep within the menu structure. The thing is, Staroffice is already on par with M$ Office, and can import M$ documents, as well as export them perfectly. It even has wordart (under a different name, of course).
I agree that MWM is terriable, and it provides a simple window manager, nothing more. I can't believe that RedHat once made it propietary software. GNOME would be a great help to users, and I think that KDE would be even easier to use, with it's simplistic interface, but it is a bit more resource intensive.
I agree that most users have a simply laughable knowledge of UNIX and its shells, and more people should be educated on how to use it, as it is to their benefit. A test shell is more verstile, as well as faster than a GUI if you know how to use it.
cns-compouting
MIT has started using RedHat-based Intel boxes for the public-access terminals (i.e. where people go to check mail and such). They still have a lot of old Suns and SGI boxes lying around, and such, but there are now quite a few Linux terminals, too. The user interface is consistent across architectures, and is nowadays built on GNOME.
[
In the physics department of the UofC (www.fys.ku.dk) all the lab computers run debian GNU/linux. Software installed include: Browsers (opera,moz,NS) Mathematica, Staroffice, and various other sorts of stuff. Standard setup uses fvwm95, but KDE can be set up as well. Most programs run on the clients, but users files are located on the file server. The system allows webmail access (twig), your own homepage, and ssh access. It works pretty well, is stable, and seldom cracked. If only they'd set up konqueror as the standard filemanager (instead of shell) it'd be really good. Of course, in a physics lab the geekiness factor isn't as much a problem as it'd be elsewhere. The math department switched to linux recently, but that's another story. If you set up linux the right way (use KDE) I think you'd be able to make people use it anywhere, just don't give them any choice. When they get used to it, it would probably work better than win.
Im a computer science major at the University of Southern Mississippi (yes we have computers here ;) , and a lot of the students here use linux and unix machines all the time. The thing is they use a windows box to ssh or telnet (god forbid) into a *nix machine and then do their work, check email, submit homework, etc. Most of them don't even know that there are graphical interfaces for *nix. You might consider using vnc to let the students get used to an X environment before you switch them over. Or use something like plex86, wine, vmware, etc to supplement windows addictions.
I think I am not therefore...
At the University of Washington Bothell, we have a department Linux lab running redhat 7.2. Here is a link to the lab's homepage http://www.bothell.washington.edu/infosys/computer labs/linuxlab.html.
I actually am an assistant in the lab and have found out that the machines are relatively easy to support and that by using NIS and NFS they can be made to operate very cleanly. Students are given a hundred megs or so of space on the main server and since their home directories mount out of that their home on all of the machines is identical and all their documents are saved.
We have no file space problems and users can compile their own files in their own systems and over the course of the last quarter the lab's popularity has steadily incresed.
If you want any additional details on the lab feel free to email me.
.: 2+2 = PI SQRT(1+N)
My high school, where I have also taught summer classes, switched to primarily using Linux for school-owned, student-accessed computers. It's been working pretty well, and it's been a definite success in terms of using older hardware; check out the partial documentation, which includes contact info for the admin. In short, my experience was that new students (who arrived for the summer) found what they expected--email and wordprocessing--and were only stumped by the lack of a way to use floppies (which, in the opinion of myself and the admins, was a Good Thing--the danged things are obsolete and a PITA anyhow). The lab uptime was much better, as well. The returning (regular-year) students complained a bit more, but I saw that more as being unhappy with change and a result of not being able to download and play Windows games anymore.