[Inschool] Best settings for LINUX on students oldies

[Bruce Smith]

> I just took on the task of putting LINUX onto a raft of ancient machines
> which my school is putting up for student sale.  These cannot have of
> course MS operating systems so LINUX is just the ticket.  I'm currently
> installing
> BS6.2 onto a Gateway 75MHz 16M RAM, ca 500M hard drive.  The process
> is very slow of course but once I got the hard disk recognized, it is
> going.
> If I like the settings, installed modules, partitions, window manager,
> I'll ghost this hard disk to the other machines.
> 
> Now the questions are:
> 1. Should I upgrade to 7.2?


I would NOT recommend it on a 16MB machine, as the newer kernel
requires a lot more memory.

I would highly recommend that you make sure you download and
install all the latest errata for 6.2.


> 2. Since most of these machines will have no CDROM drive, I'll want some
> kind of boot diskette in case of problems.  What type of disk?  a
> rescue, a boot.img disk?


"Tom's Root Boot" is a nice little distro that runs from diskette.


> 3. Should I try to put on StarOffice which will be terribly slow
> OR should I have them use gnumeric and abiword, with instructions on how
> to save them onto a floppy so they can be read on the school's MSwindows
> networked machines?


I dout you'll have enough memory for Star, and have no idea about
the others.  I'm not even sure how well windows will run.


> 4. Which rpm's would be most useful?  They will not have a modem
> initially and so must work with what I give them or have on a floppy.


I don't know.  Install the RPM's for what they need to do.

> 5. I plan on running a Saturday workshop for the students/parents who
> put out the $25 necessary for a working system.  Should I try to teach
> them command line UNIX methods?


That would be a good machine for command line.  That would
run much better than X-windows.

--------------------------------------------
Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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