At 05:28 PM 11/6/01 +0530, Philip wrote:

On Tue, 6 Nov 2001, Vaibhav Arya wrote:

...

3. Admin Desktop: Student Desktop minus EE/MechE packages, plus email

clients, plus Line of Business apps (accounting, etc) And most important, Wine / DosEMU -- To be able to run existing Windows apps that they are used to.

Wine/dosemu cannot run all windows apps. I'd suggest letting admin stick with windows until these tools are mature enough. Let the college ease into linux, and then let them ask for the change. Maybe put just one or two admin machines with linux.

Also, better than having separate machines for admin/students, I'd suggest something similar to what the govt in Florida has done. They have a single very powerful server (11GB RAM), and a separate application server (also a lot of RAM). The server runs X clients, and xdm I think. Then, they have several very thin clients - basically keyboard, display and network card. These boot of a bootprom in the netcard, connect to the server, and let the user log in directly to xdm.

How many machines will be Linuxed (shifted to linux under our initiative '-) in a typical college setting? Do we really require such exotic hardware as with 11GB of ram? Could we not manage with say a P4 or Atholon dual processor with 1-2 GB or ram (with 128Mb@Rs.600 right now it seems possible)? And the very thin clients could be replaced with already existing P100Mhz's & 486's & such older hardware? What is happening is that many places the older machines are being neglected as they cannot comfortably run, say O2K or some such hogg software.

Most importantly I suppose we must see what the machines are used primarily in college for. I think that programming (for the CS depts.), running special software (for other depts.) and creating reports and other documentation will be a primarily task.

quasi

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