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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."
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
...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
I'd highly reccomend you look over at the linux k12 project @ http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/
Jamie Zawinski has produced a nice document describing how he did it, problems he faced, etc.
[LINK]
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 ;-)
Oh my!
Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
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.
The SEUL is an organization for using Linux for education. There's even a case study section.
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.
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.
While its true that we have 36,000 students using AIX for e-mail and the like here at the UW, we don't actually have any labs setup with machines running *nix (there is one RedHat lab for the CS students). I've been trying to convince my boss in the UW polisci lab to run linux for a year-plus, but he won't even let me setup a linux server to run mySQL. So, even though UW is home to such greats as Pine and IMAP, I'm sad to report almost all of our labs are Mac/Windows.
Only 120 characters... who can summarize their entire world understanding in 120 characters?!
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.
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)
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 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.
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
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.
Score: +5 Ingenious troll
Best flawed rationalization for using Window$ I've seen in -- ten minutes?
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
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?
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
So the computers have it down pat, but how bout the 30k people who are gonna use them? How do you secure your boxes? These are workstations, not dumb terminals. You need workstation security, not just account security. You need a friendly interface that people will not be afraid of. You dont want to scare people off by giving them a complicated, unfamiliar user interface such as anything other than windows or macos.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
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
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).
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/
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.
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.
Also they boot over the network so each that updates only have to be done on the network images rather than at the individual machines. They are very good setup for "kiosk" setup, where you would only use it to quickly check your email, print pages, and hop on AIM Express, but besides that, it's rather limited. [I mean, you probably wouldn't want to stand in front of a kiosk for too long anyways]
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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
All 14,000 or so RIT students can login to a UNIX shell, and I wish it worked without a problem. I have 'echo "some@address.com" >> .forward' for more people than I can count. People don't like UNIX shells. People don't want UNIX shells. People want eye candy and web interfaces.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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.
So set up Gnome or KDE on the workstations, no admin privileges to any user accounts of course, with the home directories Coda-mounted and with things locked down per standard for an ISP's shell machines (ie. tighter than a nervous virgin clam). Minimal services running, don't install dangerous things like nmap, and give them a desktop skin that resembles Windows and an xdm/gdm/kdm login box. You only have to assemble the workstation image once, then just clone it over onto workstations as needed. Kernel modules and DHCP are your friend here.
For extra evilness points, lock down their dot-files by making them owned by a special user and not writable by the account itself. This requires a bit of a balancing act, since some dot-files do need to be writable for storing state.
This is the same process needed to secure the workstations used by the CS classes, you're just talking about several thousand workstations instead of several hundred. There's more administrative overhead, but the actual things needed for each workstation are roughly the same. Just be sure to have a beefy enough fileserver (or spread the load over several) to handle the network-mounted home directories.
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.
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
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.
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.
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