[LUAU] new k12ltsp lab

Eric Brown eric.brown at www.mi-spot.com
Tue Oct 5 11:41:50 PDT 2004


Hello all,

I thought I'd share with you a successful k12ltsp story from the mainland.  
I was inspired by the HOSEF's work in Hawaii after reading an article about 
them on Slashdot a few weeks ago.

I'm a math and web design teacher in Keokuk, IA.  I was promised 20 new 
computers for this school year, but by the time the year started, I was 
stuck with my 20 Pentium 233MHz, 64 MB Ram (they'll only take 96), running 
Windows 95.  If a student went to just one wrong site, the machine was 
filled with spyware and slowed to a halt.  Most classes, students spent 
waiting for the computer to crank along.

I reasearched the idea like mad.  I read everything on K12LTSP, subscribed 
to this list, and read over HOSEF's website.  I shopped on E-Bay, and found 
a Quad Pentium III Xenon 550 MHz with 1 GB RAM that I picked up for just 
under $500 including shipping.  I spent all last week setting up the server 
(it really only took that long due to a hardware conflict that I finally 
resolved).  Yesterday, with the help of my students, I've got 18 machines 
running off of the server.  18 run only a little slower than one machine, 
and even fully loaded, the machines are running so much better than Windows 
95.  I was afraid that 1gb ram wouldn't do the job.  I brought the principal 
down, and he's willing to reimburse me for the server, as well as purchase 
more ram (I'm hoping to get my machine up to 4gb).

I plan to have details and pictures up on a web site soon.

Thank you so much HOSEF for helping me find working machines, and helping me 
spread the word of open source.

Eric Brown
Keokuk High School



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