[ale] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

[James P. Kinney III]

On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 10:07 -0400, Jeff Hubbs wrote:
> The only gotcha with old laptops is that many of their batteries will 
> likely have gone bad and are very expensive (think >$100) to replace.  
> So, having them run untethered may be a nonstarter. 

In fact, some laptop models won't run at all even tethered to power if
the battery is bad.

>  Perhaps if you got 
> 1/5 of them set up as running LTSP nodes with good batteries, the rest 
> could be made into a MOSIX cluster to use as the LTSP app server. 

Ew! Clustering laptops would make for a very underpowered,
poor-performance cluster. Everything about laptops is weak. Many of the
laptops built for the Win98/W2K systems were at best 64MB RAM and that
was shared with the video. Add to this the slowest hard drives on the
planet. It's a recipe for performance even slower than just running
multiple app servers.

A possible better alternative might be to pull out the hard drives (cuts
power and noise) and netboot the cluster directly from a larger, central
server. This can provide CPU space for serving apps to thin clients.

However, many of those older laptops didn't have built-in networking and
if they did, it was 10BT, not 100BT. This puts these things squarely in
the "client only" status.

Given that they were built for W2K at the latest, this puts them at 4
years old. The lifetime of the laptop battery is 2-3 years of typical
use (best case scenario. worst case: 6 months). So the likelihood of
working batteries is very small. Thus, a mandatory power tether limits
them to non-portable use. This means the laptops can't be sent home with
kids for after school use without more cash outlay to repair outdated
equipment. 

If the laptops are usable with a power brick, they are at least usable!
Now the power brick becomes he weak point as the cords don't take well
to repeated flexing at either the socket or the brick end. Hot glue
makes a great poor-man's strain relief add-on :)

At this point, a light Linux installation with all the apps the kids use
could be loaded. The big issue is networking. Win-modems are a PIA to
setup and support. If the plan is to allow kids to check out a laptop
from, say, the school library media center, then a configuration
identical to the school systems needs to be loaded on the loaners. If
the kids are expected to use the Internet for the work, they will be
expected to Internet access at home. That means they already have a
computer of some type at home. So no laptop needed. A Knoppix-style disk
for the home system would be easier for Linux-based apps. Web-based apps
are a no-brainer. Kids can easily be sent home with a CD of open-source
apps for Windows that mesh nicely with the school setup (the OpenCD).

But it all boils down to _why_ the laptops are not currently working.

My personal preference would be a K12LTSP setup for the laptops with
take-home CD's  for either remote access back to the LTSP server
(external network access speed issues arise) of replicated environment
in a boot disk with student work saved to either floppy (not a great
idea but workable) or better to USB keychain device (16MB $5).

> 
> Us Gentoo types salivate at the distcc potential...
> 
All drooling aside ( :-) PLEASE!! DROOL NOT ON THE KEYBOARD!!)

Seriously, for acceptance by the powers that be, a heavy-weight
commercial vendor would be a better choice (not for technical reasons,
but political). For some reason, Novel is just not pushing SUSE for the
schools. They are already in most of the schools districts in some
manner and could really expand into the school Linux server arena but
they aren't moving. (????) RedHat is chasing cash from business and
scientific groups and they aren't chasing schools either. Apple did
themselves a favor by offering discounts on their stuff years ago and it
resulting in a cult following that rivals few others. Fedora has the
tacit backing of RedHat and thus has _some_ business-backing clout. It
also has the advantage of having a tremendous install base and huge
repositories of 3rd party apps built for it. Gentoo is moving along but
it seems to be geared much more toward the technical crowd. I am tempted
to suggest Debian just for the upgradeability aspects. But in the end, I
would vote for Fedora just because it is a general purpose environment
with good app support and a mostly painless upgrade and support process.
Replicating K12LTSP server installs with kickstart is a huge timesaver.
If laptops are used as portable (i.e. student check-out) tools,
kickstart is a fantastic tool for the initial setup. rsync is a great
tool on the return to bring the system back to is initial state (cleans
up any cruft from student use).


> - Jeff
> 
> Daniel Howard wrote:
> 
> >Folk,
> >
> >I've know of a school that has over 600 older laptops (either Win98 or
> >Win2k) for a 1:1 grant-funded study in 2000 that now only has 50
> >functional units, assumedly due to viruses, upgrading OS w/o adding more
> >memory, lack of support, etc.  We want to consider converting these into
> >K12LTSP thin clients using our laptop cart idea, but I wanted to make
> >sure we were considering all options.
> >
> >We could probably load Linux OS directly onto each laptop and keep them
> >as stand-alone units so the kids could take them home as the original
> >model proposed, but the support issue (number of PCs to support) along
> >with the need to plug them in to power daily in the classrooms and
> >either plug network in or log on wirelessly makes that less desirable.
> >I'd rather see the kids stay after school for a few hours to do homework
> >on them when necessary and reduce the number of PCs to support by a
> >factor of 50 by turning them all into thin clients that stay at the school.
> >
> >Are there any other ideas out there for what to do to revive 600 drunken
> >laptops?
> >
> >Regards,
> >Daniel
> >
> >_______________________________________________
> >Ale mailing list
> >Ale at ale.org
> >http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >
> >  
> >
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> Ale at ale.org
> http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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