Easter Ramblings

New (to us) Dell’s

9 Dell’s donated by Ralph Depping, Dell GX170 with 2gb ram 80gb disks.

These are very good computers with 2gigs of ram (1 gig alone is great).

Installed Ubuntu 10.10 on 6 of them using Clonezilla (setup 1 then clone the rest).

Setup Mel’s room with 2 of the rebuilt computers. I noticed that the power supply cord on one of the computers that was replaced was dead and the monitor seemed a bit unreliable as well, both need further investigation (see note on electrical power below).

Patrice will copy any project work done by the children off her 2 computers and I will put 2 rebuilt ones in their stead. The computers in Patrice’s room have only 256mb ram which is definitely not enough, will look to scrounging up some more. See note below on computer speed.

That leaves 2 more GX170 computers ready to go so teachers let us know where you want them and we will put them in place.

3 Remaining newly donated computers.

1 is not booting up diagnostic lights suggest memory problems, will investigate.

1 has Ubuntu 11.4 on it but this release has problems with the built in Intel graphics chips on this model of Dell’s. I should know better than jumping on the latest release which only came out on 28^th April and has a lot of bugs to work out.

1 is a GX280 which will need to be installed from scratch, do not want to clone from GX170 and also does not have ps2 connections so needs usb mouse and more unusual usb keyboard.

Education software and games.

Shortcuts and applications need to be sorted out on all computers, i.e. what programs are being used. Teacher feedback is needed for this. Need to decide which office suite to go with:

1. Microsoft (not an option without a budget)
2. Open Office
3. Libre Office
4. Google docs

My preference is for Libre Office (basically Open Office under a new name with most of the Open Office developers having moved to Libre. Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and have taken the foot off the pedal with Open Office development. Also Libre handles the new Microsoft xml formats; docx and xlsx.) Either way if all of us start using the same version of office then there will be less hassle with opening files and moving files between home and work. All of these programs work both on Windows computers and Ubuntu. If anyone wants copies of Libre Office I have tons of CDs that I can burn them onto. This is only my opinion and we need to hear others before we decide, Christine mentioned Google docs but I have only used these 2 years ago and would like to take another look.

Logins need to be sorted out.

1. Need a general login for the kids (basic user not admin)
2. Need a general login for teachers (basic user not admin)
3. Need a secure login for teachers to do frontline technical support which they should only use when necessary i.e. not for daily login.
4. Need a very secure login for technical/admin staff to do updates etc.
5. Need to lock down the kids desktops, I did a little bit of experimentation with the Profile manager and it did not go well. Maybe I need to read the manual first.

Giving each class a decent standard of equipment.

It is not easy to have a decent standard of equipment when we are relying on donations. There are 3 things that make up the user experience;

1. Computer speed
2. Monitors
3. Mice

1. Computer speed

We are addressing this right now by replacing the existing computers with those donated by Ralph. The computers that are in the classes right now are good models and once we source some ram or move some of the ram around then we should have a fairly uniform computer speed for all classes.

2. Thoughts on Monitors

We have a mishmash of monitors at the school all of which have been donated. The monitor is what really makes the difference as a user experience. I have done some research into pricing and there are decent LCD monitors on the market for €100 – €120 with a 3 year warranty. That comes to €12 per student for 10 monitors, would it be stretching things to ask parents for a donation? The big old CRT monitors take up a lot of room are not good for the eyes and definitely hard on the back when moved.

3. Mice

A lot of what the kids and teachers do is with the mouse and mice are fairly cheap nowadays, (less than €10) so a small investment in optical mice might be a good idea. We need to do a quick assessment of the mice that we have. Surface is also important both with roller ball mice and optical mice. We need to look at the desk surface and make sure that it is best for the mice that we use. Roller mice need a bit of grip to move the ball, the small round cover on the bottom can easily be removed, pop out the ball and try to clean all of the gunk off the 3 rollers inside especially the 2 long ones, a fingernail works well. Optical mice are messed up by shiny surfaces, in one room I noticed they were using clear plastic covers under the mice which will make an optical mouse jump around the place.

Note on electrical outlets

Power strips (where you plug one end into the wall which gives you 4 or more sockets).

These should not be “daisy chained” i.e. plugging 1 power strip into another.

Unfortunately we have invested in surge protected power strips that block the second socket, they do not have a cable on them. Any sockets we invest in in the future should have a cable and surge protection. We need to do some investigation into this, anyone know an electrician who could advise us?

Clonezilla

Used the clonezilla free cloning package. Went with the Live CD which means cloning one pc at a time and removing the hard disk from the target pc and adding it to the master pc. Be careful with the Master, Slave, CS jumper as you will be putting second drive and cd drive on the same ide cable. Also note that when you boot up to clonezilla and hit enter the screen goes black or has little boxes on it, there is nothing indicating that something is happening and I was a bit impatient thinking there was a problem, you need to let the system load which takes a good minute or more. Follow the options on screen which are pretty straight forward, if you make a mistake you have to reboot and start over.

I will investigate clonezilla further to see if the Live CD can do images across the network which would mean less hassle opening the case up and moving hard disks.

Clonezilla Server

Now this is the way to go and I hope to get one built in the near future. With this we will be able to clone 7 pc’s at a time without opening a box.

LTSP Server (thin client computing)

Thin client computing means using one good server and many old low power pc’s that have no hard disk.

Unfortunately I did not get the test server into the school. I would like to have the server in for next weekend as there is an event at the school (Saturday 14^th May, Eurovision night) and it would be a great time to have people test drive the system to see if it is viable. Don’t know much about the Eurovision event but I will see if we can work something out with the PA. We could give out Libre Office on CD for people to try at home or have a room with a projector to show parents the Ubuntu operating system.

Next ICT Meeting

We need to have another ICT meeting soon! Some suggestions for topics:

Inventory hardware and software (what licensed software do we own?)

Teacher training

Selecting software

Gathering administration notes

LTSP server

Saving and Backing up teacher/student work

Computer lab

Email me and I will add more here……

The first PA Newsletter of the 2010/11 school year is now available to view online: Vol. 3, Iss. 1 – Sept. 2010. Get all the news on after-school activities, welcome to new teachers & parents, National Parents’ Council news and more.

The June Parent Association Newsletter is now available. Get the latest news on year-end accounts, interactive whiteboards and more.

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