[luau] Status of McKinley Community School

[Warren Togami]

Last week Saturday Jeff Zidek and I met with Michael Bishop, tech 
coordinator of McKinley and Farrington Community schools.  Their needs 
were desktop computers capable of running this Windows foreign language 
training software "Rosetta Stone" and simple Samba file shares.

Their earlier testing with plain Wine managed to run Rosetta Stone quite 
well, however sound didn't seem to work.  I tested with CodeWeavers Wine 
and it seemed to work a bit better, and CodeWeavers CrossOver Plugin did 
the job completely perfectly.  Rosetta Stone is a fairly simple Windows 
gui program but it depends on Quicktime for sound output.  Based upon 
the testing I believe it would be possible for Linux desktops to do the 
job with a tweaked copy of free Wine, however a site license of 
CrossOver Plugin may be beneficial in order to use all the Windows 
browser plugins, stuff that end users tend to expect these days.

They were initially thinking about Linux thin clients for Rosetta Stone 
+ Wine, however due to the CPU requirements this is infeasible.  We will 
instead supply Pentium II's and higher to do the job.  We may need to 
buy additional RAM for the desktops.  Each machine will NFS root boot 
the entire operating system from the server in order to keep maintenance 
costs lower.  Gigabit fiber is at the site so this should work well.

The site also has a Windows lab that will soon be running Rosetta Stone 
too.  We discussed mapping drive letters there to Samba file shares in 
order for those desktops to reach the language CD's that the application 
needs.  A quick test of this worked well.  Later we may setup Samba PDC 
for authentication in the Windows lab.

Warren Togami
warren at togami.com