[Tech] PXE project - still alive

[Christian Einfeldt]

Hi,

On Mon, Feb 15, 2016 at 6:14 AM, Michael Paoli <
Michael.Paoli at cal.berkeley.edu> wrote:

> Cool,
>
> And, other thing I was thinking about (part technical, part not) ...
> if I understand correctly, at persent, Partimus isn't in schools?
>

Correct.


> (but hopes to soon be again).  As I understand it, teacher that was
> using/"supporting" it in school left, and that whomever/whatever
> came in to replace didn't want (at least at that time) to use/continue
> the Partimus/*buntu thing.
>

They went with Chromebooks, which we are seeing a lot of.  Chromebooks is
the #1 reason that we are not in schools right now.  School after school
has gone over to Chromebooks.  Which is Linux, so I am not unhappy.  I
would like to think that we had a small role to play in getting Microsoft
Windows out of these schools.  Amazing how easily the idea evaporated that
"We have to train them on what they will use at work and home in the
future."  Poof.  Gone.


>
> Anyway, in regards to all that, I was thinking perhaps (and maybe on IRC,
> or ???)
> do a "post-mortem" meeting to go over what did - and didn't work - in that
> environment, and what we can (at least feasibly) do to improve future
> successes (e.g. not only get in more schools again, but be the great
> resource
> that neither schools nor teachers would want to see dropped or removed from
> their schools).
>

I am happy to do an IRC to discuss it, although I think that in this case,
email is better, as it is asynchronous.  And it is really really very
simple.  Google made it easy for them to get a notebook for every kid.
Period.  End of sentence.


>
>
> And ... just teensy bit of my thoughts/opinion on that too ...
> DebianEdu / Skolelinux - might be an *excellent* fit for schools (probably
> at least
> worth some serious investigation).  Most notably, a whole lot of what
> Partimus and
> schools would generally want, is already very well worked out for
> DebianEdu / Skolelinux - and there are lots of resource around it for
> Linux in schools
> and particularly DebianEdu / Skolelinux itself in schools.  Anyway, might
> potentially
> save us a whole lot of work (e.g. avoid reinventing the wheel ... and
> perhaps
> poorly or repeating many of the mistakes that folks have already made and
> figured
> out and fixed/improved for use of Linux in schools).  Anyway, just a
> thought on
> that.
>

I am willing to download and try SkoleLinux, but I must admit that I am
very partial to simple, vanilla Ubuntu or Lubuntu.  It is so easy for me to
figure out, because there is so much documentation.  And since I am the
weak link in the chain, and because I spend a lot of time on client sites,
it is really helpful to me to use what I am familiar with.  You guys are
good at figuring stuff out, but sadly, I often make very rooky mistakes.
Sorry.         :-/


>
> I might wonder, what target environment are we
> optimizing/configuring the systems for?


Right now, we are targeting community computers in the homeless shelter.
Again, there are the merits of a simple solutions, because it is a simple
use case, presently.


> Targeting multiple substantially distinct
> environments does multiply the amount of work and resources required.
>

Yeah, and I often can't do much, which is not good, because then our
projects slow down when I need to bug people like Grant or Elizabeth for
answers which appear to be frustratingly simple, but are actually not so
simple to me.


>
> Anyway, good work on the PXE etc. stuff - most of that quite applies
> pretty much
> regardless of the specific distribution and target environment - I think
> the only
> especially major difference may be Kickstart "vs." FAI - and even there
> there's
> probably a fair bit of overlap.  I'm hoping to have some time to test it
> out,
> etc., but ... time, ... priorities, ... we shall see.  (E.g. some fair
> bits of my
> time have gotten sucked into things like keeping some LUG(s) from
> disappearing off
> the Internet ... more resources for, e.g. Partimus, to draw upon, if
> things like
> SF-LUG exist (and where's SF-LUG running?  All but the list stuff is on a
> virtual
> machine running on hardware where I live, and the list stuff is running
> out of
> Rick Moen's home - an installation which bit over a year ago I very
> substantially
> assisted in getting back on-line and operational again ... and yesterday,
> just
> applied the nudges to get BALUG's hosting back on-line (after a billing
> payment
> SNAFU by the person who's been covering that)).
>

Thanks for all of your work, Michael!
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