Very Newbie question

[Clinton MacDonald]

Mr. Pratt:

Richard Pratt wrote:
> I'm playing with YDL as a way to leverage some
> more use out of a bunch  of older iMacs we have
> here at our High School.

Running Yellow Dog Linux is quite a reasonable use for older macs (see 
below), though Mac OS 9 might still have plenty of legs in it for some 
of these machines.

Here's a brand-new Web site that might give some hints for using older 
Macs to their potential:

<http://www.macusingeducators.com/>

See also:

<http://lowendmac.com/index.shtml>

Mac OS X is not even out of the question for machines that have enough 
(okay, *lots*) of RAM (at least 256 MB or more). However, insufficient 
RAM or insufficient funds for OS X licenses would put the kibosh on the 
that idea. Hence, I can see why you might be considering Yellow Dog 
Linux. RAM and hard drive size are the two biggest factors in Linux 
(though not so much so as for Mac OS X!). You need at least 2.5 GB hard 
drive and 64 MB (128 MB is better) for a usable GUI-based Linux 
installation.

> Since, I have to admit, I'm also fairly new to
> Linux in general, I'm having difficulty figuring
> out how to set up these machines so students
> will be able to access network home directories
> and printers on our mostly Windows network. My 
> question really is this: Which install (desktop?
> workstation? something else?) will give kids the
> access they need? Or are there components I need
> to install outside of the standards? Any help
> will be much appreciated.

There is, obviously, no one right answer to this question. So much 
depends on which programs you want to use, what hardware you have (RAM 
memory, hard drive size, etc.), how adventurous are your students, and 
so on.

Yellow Dog Linux is cloned from Red Hat version 8, so you can go to the 
library and get one of the many Red Hat 8 books to determine what is 
available in each installation. As for which installation you want, you 
will have to judge that for yourself. My experience was that no one 
installation (workgroup, desktop, or whatever) had all the programs I 
wanted, so I picked and chose. I recommend you take one of the iMacs and 
do a trial installation. Use it yourself for a couple of weeks or a 
month, and you will know which programs will be useful to you and your 
students.

Some useful programs will include:

[] OpenOffice.org -- a Microsoft (spit) Office clone: a little buggy but 
the industry standard for Linux; great import filters for Office documents
[] AbiWord -- a nice Word processor that will import Microsoft (spit) 
Word documents (my personal favorite)
[] Mozilla -- the open source version of Netscape Navigator (highly 
recommended)
[] Evolution -- a very good e-mail and organizer program, patterned 
after Outlook
[] Gaim -- a chat client (I don't use chat, so I don't know much about this)
[] kedit, gedit -- GUI-based text editors
[] and many more (even some decent games)!

Good luck!

Best wishes,
Clint

-- 
Dr. Clinton C. MacDonald | <mailto:clint DOT macdonald AT sbcglobal DOT net>