2009-2010 Year Approaching

School starts in 8 days, but I started back at school a couple of weeks ago. We had a string of break-ins on campus at the end of last year and while the thief initially (and surprisingly) didn't take anything aside from a few dollars laying around during the first two incidents, he eventually wised up and swiped a laptop.

In any case, I had some work to do processing some new equipment brought in for different situations like the one above, and of course I wanted to make a little progress on the Ubuntu servers we have in the labs and classrooms to see if I could have them running local apps at the start of the year.

Anyone looking to implement local apps at this point (myself included) would be wise to remember that it is a very experimental proposition as it currently exists. That being said, there are a few people around who seem to have gotten not only firefox to work as a local app, but flash as well. If envy could be sent across the intertubes, you would detect an abundance of it emanating from me right now.

The good news is that I know that I've at least got the first step of firefox as a local app going thanks to Gavin and the guys on the edubuntu user list who really did a great job of dumbing down the Thin Client How to NAT so an amateur like me can follow it without frustration. In case you're thinking of trying local apps yourself you'll soon realize the first step is setting up the LTSP server as a NAT gateway so thin clients that don't boot off of the server (or local apps running off the thin client instead of the server) can get Internet access.

Regrettably, there's not a similarly concise and simple How To page for setting firefox as a local app, but I'm working on the process and if I get it nailed down I'll be sure to put some hours into a comprehensive How To for others to follow. Paying it forward and all that I suppose.

Finally, I sent a message to the xfce users listserv asking how to set up kiosk mode in xfce 4.6 but I haven't heard a response yet. I'm hoping it is just because it's the weekend, but the pessimist in me says it's time to move to KDE's well documented kiosk tool. I downloaded the latest Linux Mint image with KDE 4.3 as a means of reviving an old Gateway laptop my cousin sent my way a few months back. I'm planning on experimenting with the kiosk tool there and hoping it works as well as it claims. Great to be back! -joe

Comment Responses and The Many Differences Between Private Sector and Public Sector Employment

Earlier today I got an email from the Middle School Spanish Teacher explaining that her student computers (Edubuntu Feisty LTSP setup) weren't working and wondering if I could take a look at the problem. The first thing I noticed in turning on the server was the fact a horrible rattling noise assuredly coming from a fan or some other spinning device. Opening the box up I noticed a couple of wires had fallen beneath the fan shield and were the cause of the noise. A couple of seconds later the box was up and running perfect....except that there was no picture on the monitor.

I pulled the VGA cord out of the server, plugged in a different monitor and it lit right up. What could be the problem? I restarted the computer, verified that it was fine and switched back to the original monitor. No luck. I power cycled the monitor to no avail before the solution hit me.

Can you think of what it could be? The monitor is not broken btw. Pretty puzzling right?

Apparently some kid had flipped open the front flap on the monitor and changed the "contrast" and "brightness" settings so that the screen was completely black. I tried resetting the monitor but for some reason that didn't work and it was only after I manually upped both the contrast and brightness that the screen came back to life.

Just one little story illustrating the many little differences between tech support in a public school and tech support in the private sector (I'm assuming most adults don't intentionally screw with the brightness and contrast levels of their monitors until no picture at all is showing). Good Times.

So I also thought I'd take the time to post a little response I wrote up to some of the comments on last week's post about Xubuntu (still loving it btw, just got Win2k running on Virtualbox on a P4 2GHz test machine).

Apparently someone linked to the post because the 7 comments I got exceeded my previous comment total by about.....6. Here's my response to the various things people had to say:

"Thanks for all the replies fellas. I've got a quick couple of minutes before my 7th graders show up to learn Google Sites (super sweet new addition to Apps BTW) but so far Xubuntu is doing great on the quad core Dell. (Now we'll see how it does with 8 cores!)

Flash is very reliable BTW, not a problem so far except that it's slow on the clients which I've posted about. This does get a little better if "hardware acceleration" is turned off in the settings though.

I like Ubuntu for lots of reasons, but most of them are described in slide 7 of my presentation on hartmanbot.com.

I haven't tried PCLinuxOS, but from everything I've read Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE are the big three in terms of hardware compatibility and ease of use. I owe it to myself to try it out in any case.

I did try puppy and deli and a couple of others while I was debating the merits of Ubuntu and actually wrote about it in the previous post here:
http://hartmansblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/hardy-hardy-hardy-happy-return-to.html

I guess I should elaborate a bit on what I did and didn't like about each of the other distributions. Better yet, I'll post on EXACTLY what I need out of a distro and maybe someone can prescribe me the perfect one.

Fluxbuntu sounds good BTW. I'm definitely going to check that out for my stand alone machines. News coming soon...

Cheers! -joe"

Cheers! -joe

SCaLE 2008 Impressions and Photos

It's been a busy couple of weekends for me the past two weeks. Last weekend was Valentine's Day in NYC of course and the weekend before was the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCaLE) in Los Angeles.

I was fortunate enough to have my presentation on using Edubuntu in the classroom accepted for one of the sessions on the first day of the Expo and since this took place on Friday amidst an offshoot track of SCaLE called OSSIE (Open Source Software in Education) I got a substitute to cover my classes and drove the Towncar the two hours north to La La Land. I arrived at the Expo around noon which meant I had a couple of hours to hang out before I was due to talk. I spent a little time wandering around the event just seeing what there was to be seen. I'd say it was a smaller than average event but bigger than I expected, which was an exciting surprise.

After a few minutes I found myself a seat and listened to the speaker scheduled before me. I'm sad to say I forget her name now, but she was a doctoral student who used FreeMind in her research to see how concept maps changed information retention in students. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I was more involved in polishing up my own presentation than I should have been to pay ample attention to what she was saying, but as good as FreeMind looks I'm still pretty committed to using Internet based applications as much as possible. This means that sites like bubbl.us are a lot more attractive to me than software programs like FreeMind. The data that she had was very encouraging towards the use of mind maps in general though, so that was good news.

When it was finally my time to present I was relieved to see that my laptop worked on the projector without any major flaw, but I was disappointed to see that audience members couldn't post comments to my Google-based presentation which meant while I talked. Later I figured out that this was because I hadn't "published" the presentation, but that was hours later of course.

The presentation itself went pretty well. I was nervous as usual, which meant I talked even faster than I normally do and ended up doing my presentation in about 25 minutes (last time I did it at the SDCUE conference it took 45 minutes!). Fortunately there were a lot of questions from the audience and that saved me.

Afterwards I hung around outside the auditorium for a while and just chatted with colleagues (including Tim, the OSSIE organizer and an all-around great guy). Then I wandered over to the OLPC area and fiddled with the machines for a bit. I'm still waiting for mine to be delivered by the way. I had meant to take some pictures with my camera phone and post them here, but I forgot of course. The rest of the weekend I spent hanging around Santa Monica with my old college roomies and playing golf in Century City. Not a bad weekend at all! I look forward to next year!. -joe

Edubuntu Users Listserv and How My Curriculum Works

Hello again faithful followers. I must apologize for my extended delay from posting. I wish I could say it was due to some exciting adventure in my life that occurred over the Holidays but alas, I did little more than get myself addicted to Battlestar Galactica. I did get an OLPC machine for Christmas from my parents, but in case you haven't heard, there have been some "complications" in actually receiving the machine. I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the device as soon as it comes in.

No, the real reason I haven't been posting recently is because I discovered a thriving edubuntu user community on a listserv and have been reading and contributing to that as much as I can. You can sign yourself up here if you're interested. Since the main purpose of me maintaining this blog was to have somewhere to vent, question, and participate somehow in the community, finding an alternative has supplanted my time somewhat. In fact, for a while I kind of forgot about posting here until I actually ran into an issue with thin client resolution last week and googled the problem, only to have the top two hits link back to this very blog! Now I'm not sure if that is a case of Google self-promotion or something, but I certainly hope so because the alternative (being the idea that I have somehow become an expert in edubuntu problem solving) is a far more frightening thought.

Nevertheless, it did make me realize that I have something to offer more than just my contributions to the listserv since even an ubuntu junkie like me did not discover it until very recently. Therefore I present you with my first listserv poached post below, a response to a question by another member that asked me to clarify what programs I was using in the lab with my students and how I was using them. I hope you find it interesting. Cheerio! -joe

"Hi Bill,

The current curriculum has just undergone some recent changes in light of my beginning to teach middle school students in addition to elementary school students for the first time but I'd be happy to comment about the reasoning behind the current plan.

It arose out of specific school needs, state and professional organization standards (especially ISTE and Massachusettes since California doesn't have specific computer related technology standards), and my own experience/vision. The primary driving force towards Linux, LTSP, and Edubuntu arose out of necessity as much as anything else. I work at a charter school and we inherited a campus from a defunct public school complete with network and computers, the vast majority of the latter being from the wrong side of the millennium. Many of the machines we are using now were donated by organizations (the border patrol, district attorney's office, private companies, German Consulate) that were upgrading infrastructure and would otherwise have been discarded. Thus the ability to use these many underpowered and outdated machines as thin clients appealed to me. I'd guess we have about 200 workstations on campus altogether, of which about 50 are Pentium 4 and four are Core 2 Duo (the administrators' laptops and my own). The rest are P3, P2, or slower.

I should also mention that my school is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School on the elementary side while the Middle School that just started up last year is in the accreditation process. Additionally, the elementary school operates under a German Immersion program that has the students spend one week learning in English under an English speaking teacher and the next week learning in German under a German speaking teacher. And the campus we inherited two years ago resides in a primarily Spanish-speaking and relatively underprivileged area of San Diego so our incoming students are rapidly changing the face of the school. All additional reasons to use the similarly multicultural and globally minded products of Ubuntu and GNU/Linux.

Because we are an IB school on the elementary side we have what is called a Program of Inquiry (POI) that is essentially a matrix of 6 big ideas per grade (so 36 big ideas total) that are divided up and taught throughout the year in addition (and hopefully in conjunction with) the normal classroom curriculum. POI topics are things like "objects in the sky move in predictable patterns" or "water is essential to life" and typically last for about 6 weeks. Thus my own curriculum assignments are designed around supporting these topics while at the same time teaching the students specific hard skills about the programs they are learning to use. I also try to collaborate with the teachers and their own projects as much as possible, although this is difficult since I only see each class for 45 minutes per week.

On to the curriculum....

In Kindergarten the students learn how to use a computer as many have never used one before or if they have it was for very specific tasks. Mouse practice, Tuxpaint, and learning about the parts of a computer pretty much sum it up, although I do try to collaborate with the teachers as much as possible

In First Grade the students begin typing with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 15 (the one and only piece of Windows only software I will miss in the transition to Edubuntu in the lab. If anyone has any recommendations for a similar full-featured typing tutor that will work with GNU/Linux I'd love to hear about it). They also start doing somewhat harder online activities since they can read fairly well by this age.

In Second Grade we introduce Open Office Writer. I thought it was a bit early to start with word processing so young, but the Massachusetts state technology standards called for it so I thought we'd give it a shot. After just a year of typing the kids aren't all that adept at using the program, but I've noticed that it serves as a good introduction to the common interface of toolbars and drop down menus. It also introduces the ideas of saving, opening, and printing.

In Third Grade we introduce Open Office Impress. This is actually the program I would have started with in second grade because it is so visual, but third grade seems to be about the youngest age a student can really begin doing coherent presentations in front of the class so I suppose it works here as well. Of course we continue building on what the students have learned in previous years so they learn more about Writer this year as well.

In Fourth Grade the students begin learning Scribus. Publishing and writing labs are a big part of our school's fourth grade curriculum so this was an obvious choice.

Fifth grade focuses on Kompozer and web design in preparation for middle school and the online portfolios that the students begin in 6th grade.

Sixth grade centers around Web 2.0 sites and strategies like blogger and google docs and posting to forums and emailing experts. I originally wanted to do this in 5th grade but didn't feel comfortable asking elementary school students to sign up for the Internet IDs they will need to access certain sites.

In Seventh Grade the students learn Inkscape in the hopes that it will help them spice up their digital portfolios.

In Eighth Grade the students learn GIMP for the same reason as Inkscape.

Basically the idea is to give students the hard skills they need to be able to satisfy their class requirements in the method they prefer. If they want to fulfill an assignment on the fall of the Roman empire they can choose to write a paper, create a brochure, make a newspaper or magazine, create a website, present a powerpoint or whatever. You asked if the curriculum meets the needs of teachers and I feel like this is where it helps them out (Internet safety and research skills and stuff like that falls in the librarians domain) although I will be asking the teachers to fill out a survey on the whole curriculum at the end of the year so I guess I'll know more after that happens. I also like the idea of introducing students to computer parts and programming at least a little bit, thus the mention of kturtle which I'm hoping to introduce across every grade 2 and up (as soon as I learn Logo a little better).

As much as I'd like some new iMacs and to be able to work with the middle schoolers on video editing and animation I'm also pretty committed to using open source (or at least free) software not only to avoid legacy costs for the school but also so that anything I teach in the lab can be practiced at home by the students for no additional cost (assuming the student has a computer at home). I'm more likely to just hope for some new P4s to come through the school, buy some RAM for them and set up some stand-alone Edubuntu boxes.

Sorry for the long winded response, I wasn't sure where you were coming from and (as with all teachers) once I get started I can be hard to stop. Are you in education as well? If you're in the area I'll be presenting on my Edubuntu experiences at the SCALE conference in Los Angeles next month as well as at the CUE conference in Palm Springs in March. If you're interested you can learn more about my school at aeacs.org and see my presentation at hartmanbot.com. Cheers! -joe"

From the Obvious Department: Updates help Ubuntu

Well, I'm kind of disappointed. I was all set to whine and moan about Edubuntu screwing things up on my LTSP in the outside lab and how it made me reinstall the entire OS again but then a funny thing happened. After I reinstalled the OS I noticed that it not only worked exactly as it should, but it also had solved one of the most annoying changes from Feisty to Gutsy. So now I guess this is going to be more of a fanboy post than I originally planned to do. Oh well.

So there were basically two problems with the outside lab. I'm not sure whether they were both due to a faulty install or not, but the first was really strange. I have 24 computers in the lab including the server. Therefore I set up 24 user accounts numbered "student1" through "student24" and gave them all the same password so as to make logging on as easy as possible for the students. The only problem was for some reason the server would not accept a few usernames, like "student11" and "student15" for example. I tried looking around the file system and saw that there actually were directories for the malfunctioning user accounts, but I still couldn't get the server to accept the user IDs and couldn't log on to any of the thin clients using any of the malfunctioning IDs either. Really strange stuff.

The second problem was with Flash. Feisty used to require every individual thin client to install its own version of the flash player. Annoying, but not a big deal since it was just a matter of clicking through the plug-in prompts. At least there wasn't any password or authentication required. That changed when I first installed Gutsy. It kept asking for a password and I couldn't figure out which one it wanted. Was it the admin password, the root password, or the user password? Did I need to make the user an administrator and then install flash player? In the end I just decided it was better to leave flash uninstalled. After all the outside lab is too underpowered for anything but research and word processing.

So due to the user problem I decided to just reinstall the entire thing (during which I wrote the previous post). Upon updating and checking out the above mentioned problems I noticed that my user account issue had been solved and worked just as it should, while the flash player issue was not only fixed, but no longer required each thin client to install it on its own! Once I installed the player on the server, all the thin clients had it as well! Super-sweet.

I assume that the updates since the initial release of Gutsy had done something to solve at least the flash problem if not both issues, which brings me to the point of this post: Ubuntu updates help make the OS work better.

That may seem a silly, even contrived statement, but those of us with extensive experience using Windows know that it is anything but. This is because Windows updates frequently cause as many problems as they fix. I'm not sure if it is a Windows issue or a Firefox one, but just last week I had to remove the automatic updating of Firefox on a teacher's computer because it kept losing her bookmarks and passwords with every update. I also got yelled at quite severely last year when I installed updates on a colleagues laptop. "It screws up my computer when I install the updates!" she wailed. And it was just earlier toady that I read about a software update that brought down a call center at AT&T in 1990. Now granted that last example doesn't necessarily name Windows as the culprit, but the point is that Ubuntu gets it right.

This isn't the first time Ubuntu updates have helped me out, but it's still a nice feeling every time it happens. It feels like someone is listening, paying attention, and doing something about the issues that annoy you. It makes me think Mark Shuttleworth should go into politics or something. Cheerio! -joe

About my Wedding and the 2007 SDCUE Conference

Well, after months of planning we finally got married. The wedding was amazing, better than I could have imagined and I can honestly say that it was the best day of my life. How often to hundreds of people who love you come together to pay tribute and speak so kindly of you? It was really a fantastic time, and of course our honeymoon in Jamaica wasn't too shabby either.

Now I'm back though, ready to get into more trouble with Edubuntu even as I sing its praises at local area conferences. Most recently I did a presentation at the San Diego Computer Using Educators (SDCUE) conference at a local high school. My presentation slides can be seen at my website (hartmanbot.com) if anyone is interested. The presentation went really well, I probably had a dozen or so people who attended and it was a good mix of experienced IT professionals and newer educators so I was able to get some help with my explanations from the audience.

Overall my presentation seemed really well received, and although I worry that it may have been beneath a few of the attendees I got the feeling that everyone was at least entertained to hear of my successes and failures. I was especially pleased by the unexpected demand for Edubuntu Install CDs after the presentation. I had anticipated that perhaps a couple of people would want them so I had brought a few blank CDs and figured I would just burn them on the spot since I had the images on my laptop. Instead of just a couple of people though, probably seven or eight people requested CDs. It wasn't that big of a deal really, I just spent a few minutes after my presentation burning images and labeling them. Then I dropped the finished CDs off at the raffle counter where they could be picked up any time later in the day. Hopefully everyone got their requested copies.

I've also already been accepted to speak at the West Coast CUE Conference in Palm Springs in March so I think both Benita and I will make a weekend trip out of it. I'm just delivering the same talk so there won't be as much stress this time around (not to mention it won't be eight days before my wedding this time). I'm also not planning on setting up a working example of the LTSP for people, so that should save me some hassle as well. While I've applied to speak at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles in February, I haven't heard definitively whether I've been accepted or not, although I'm pretty sure I'll be invited. I'll be sure to take some pictures this time and post them. Until next time! -joe

Xrandr, why Xorg crashed last time and the benefits of Internet based computing.

Well my reinstall of Gutsy went well. I figured out that Xorg crashed last time because I had changed the display driver from the experimental Intel driver to the older i810 driver. While this had been suggested in one of the forums as a way to enable a secondary monitor output it apparently was also the reason Xorg could not find any screens the next time I started the computer up. Since the reinstall I've tried using the same terminal command that worked for me before:

xrandr --output VGA --auto

and it seemed to do the trick. I was also able to then shut down the computer and start it again later without a hitch, so that's always a good thing.

I suppose if I were a bit more knowledgeable, daring, or motivated after the crash I could have figured out how to reconfigure Xorg so that I didn't have to do a complete reinstall of edubuntu, but after a few minutes of contemplating this I realized that there really wasn't anything on the machine that I didn't also have somewhere else. Moving from using Word to Google Docs hasn't always been easy, but in cases such as this it was enormously advantageous. I suppose I do have to worry about Google's servers crashing and losing all my stuff, but those guys seem to know what they're doing over there so I think I'll take my chances. I'll try to blog more about our school's recent move to Google Apps, but for now I'm pretty focused on the wedding. We're like 52 hours away at this point and I'm not even packed for Jamaica yet. Cheers! -joe

Xorg is ruining my life!

It would be hard to state how much I was looking forward to the Ggaphic user interface for multiple monitors that was supposed to arrive with Gutsy. Since the beginning of the school year I've had a pretty nice VAIO laptop that used to be my principal's machine (she got a new macbook), but I've been unable to use it at all with a projector to show slideshows and the like to the staff during presentations or meetings. Perhaps designing and implementing a reliable GUI for external monitors and projectors is more difficult than I understand, but this is a such HUGE issue for so many people that I'm honestly appalled that it hasn't been addressed sooner.

In any case, all is to be fixed with Gutsy right? I mean I'd seen screenshots of the Multiple Monitors GUI since the beta releases. How great would it be to be able to just connect a VGA projector to my laptop and mirror the output? I mean, under Windows MCE the machine does it AUTOMATICALLY! I just plug in the cable with the projector on and BAM! it's up on the screen. It should honestly be this easy under Ubuntu too. Alas it is not.

I wrote last time about my disappointment with the Multiple Monitors GUI on my classroom computer, but today has been an absolute debacle. Not only did the GUI not work (surprise, surprise) but after doing some command line junk (which again, should NEVER be necessary) and actually getting the setup to work fine, my Xorg server crashed and as I type this, Edubuntu is reloading all over again. Crap.

So I'm sure there's a very good reason the GUI doesn't work. I've actually read about it on the forums and whatnot, something to do with specific video cards or something. Here's the thing though: I Don't Care. This is something that "just needs to work". It's unacceptable that something this necessary requires me to scour forums, sort through a bunch of stuff about changing device drivers, xrandr, my Xorg.conf file and then eventually leads me to try some command line code that appears to work but also crashes my system.

The good news is that bulletproofX is coming with Hardy Heron and is supposed to solve these problems the way windows did way back in the last millennium, namely by defaulting to a basic GUI display set instead of just crapping out entirely. So if you thought I was anxious for this change before Gutsy, you can imagine how I'm feeling right now. Hoping beyond all hope. -joe

Found a colleague from the UK and got a good tip on my BIOS issues. Gotta love my Internets!

Now I would never describe myself as a "Mac person". I got strange looks just a few minutes ago from a co-worker when I told her I had never used iTunes (which is really only partly true as I did try it out when it was first released and found winamp to be far superior). Nevertheless the school does have about a dozen of the old colorful clamshell iBooks sitting around with about 128 MB RAM or something ridiculous. In any case I thought I might be able to boot these suckers up like a normal thin client except I didn't know how to get into the Mac BIOS (silly me, BIOS is for PCs not Macs).

So I start googling around stuff like "Mac thin client" and come across the old free software magazine article on Edubuntu and thin clients that has basically been my guiding light for this whole project (nevermind it hasn't exactly guided me flawlessly). Although I'm sure I've read the comments at the bottom of the post before yesterday I'd never noticed a particular comment that mentioned a blog on Edubuntu and LTSP before. For whatever reason I checked out the blog and found out that the author was basically doing the exact same thing as me at an elementary school in England. Best of all he had some insight into some issues I was unaware of (hard to believe considering the amount of time I spend reading about Edubuntu).

I left a comment on his blog in the hopes of talking about tech issues and then wrote my own entry on the BIOS issues. You can imagine my surprise then to find this afternoon that I not only had a comment on my own blog but a comment with a pretty nifty tip for fixing my BIOS problem. Apparently the BIOS is sustained on the motherboard by a battery that I can simply remove and then reinsert later at which the BIOS should be reset. I'm stoked to try this out, but even more stoked to have a colleague who not only knows about this stuff but is interested in it and willing to help out. I guess I knew that the Ubuntu community was pretty helpful but the Edubuntu community is so small that it's nice to find another person in the same boat.

I'm sure I'll be back to complaining about how my scanner doesn't work right, but for now I'm feeling pretty optimistic about everything. (btw, I never did get the iBooks to work). Cheers -joe

Locked out of BIOS, LTSP won't work right

This summer AEA was the beneficiary of a generous donation of a dozen Dell P4 3.0 GHz towers. I quickly resolved to use these towers as servers for both the inside and outside labs, as well as the library and some classrooms where I anticipated heavy use. Of course at the time I believed that a gig of RAM with a P4 running at that speed would be more than enough for what I was trying to do. I now know better. In any case I quickly came across the minor annoyance of being locked out of the BIOS on about 4 of the donated towers. "Not a big deal," I told myself, I could easily install the LTSP on an unlocked machine and swap hard drives with a locked machine. I followed this procedure with all the affected machines and for over a month believed myself to be golden. My world came crashing down earlier this week after I got all the switches in from Newegg and tried to set up the servers in a middle school classroom to no avail.

The potential problems ran through my head like they always do when I get stumped (which happens embarrassingly often): bad ethernet cable? bad port? problems with the network? problems with the thin client? problems with the switch? problems with the server?

After some basic troubleshooting it quickly became clear that the source of my troubles lay with the server, specifically with the network card settings. For some reason the computer was confused as to which ethernet card was the incoming port from the wall and which was the outgoing to the switch. When I figured this out I grabbed another server from a nearby room and tried it out. Except I had the exact same problem! (I now realize that both of the servers I grabbed had their BIOS locked). Now I was really stumped.

It has taken me two days to finally understand what the true source of the problem is (at least I think I've figured it out). Evidently there is some setting that is changed on the BIOS when Edubuntu is installed that does not get set otherwise. I believe this to be the case because this afternoon I took an unlocked computer with a good hard drive and got it to work fine. Then I swapped the hard drive into a locked computer and ran into the same networking confusion. Swapped back the server worked fine.

So I guess my next step is to email the donor from this summer and hope that he knows what the BIOS password is. Otherwise I'm not sure what options I have. Maybe I can call Dell and figure out some way around the password. Or I could try and guess it. That's never worked for me before but who knows? Cheerio -joe

Another setback

So I'm back to running Windows 2k in the inside lab. That's the one that I spend most of my time teaching in. I'm going to stick with Edubuntu in the outside lab even though it is slower than molasses because at least then I don't have to worry about things breaking so much and viruses aren't an issue.

I have much higher requirements for the inside lab though. In here I hope to do everything from web programming to podcasts to video editing. The machines can barely handle 12 students playing the same flash game at the same time though, so I had no choice but to go back to Windows 2000 in here. I'm really disappointed, but at least now I can go back to using Mavis Beacon 15 with the kids. As many typing programs as there are out there, it's astounding how awful the vast majority of them really are.

ATTENTION ENTREPRENEURS, THE UNIVERSE IS IN DIRE NEED OF A SLICK YET EFFECTIVE ONLINE AJAX TYPING TUTOR SITE THAT AT LEAST TRACKS STUDENT PROGRESS AND HOPEFULLY INCLUDES A PLETHORA OF FUN TYPING GAMES. NOW GET TO IT!

cheers -joe

Troubles with Bluetooth

So somehow (I think on Digg) I heard about GrandCentral, an internet company that offers "one phone number for life". Naturally they were purchased by Google and only recently opened up for new customers again. I decided to sign up and got a pretty sweet number that I'm looking forward to trying out. Of course it also has all the options it should like contacts and stuff, but it has some cool features as well like visual voice mail and the like. Well I decided to try to port my contacts over from my phone to my computer and then upload them but ran into some trouble.

The first problem is that of my LG CU500 phone with AT&T (formerly Cingular, formerly AT&T). It only allows me to save my contacts either on my phone or on the SIM card and not onto the MicroSD card I have that conveniently plugs into the computer via a USB adapter via a MiniSD adapter (or is it the other way around?). I have no way of plugging my SIM card into the computer to get the contact information. I can however use Bluetooth to send a vCard with the contact information on it from the phone to the computer, and it so happens that I have a Bluetake 007si Bluetooth Dongle for just this sort of situation. Problem solved right?

Well the first issue I had was that when I plug in the dongle there is no immediate indication on the part of GNOME or Edubuntu that anything has happened. The little blue light on the dongle only lights up intermittently as well so I figured it wasn't even working. I googled the problem and found some ubuntuforums.com stuff that made me use the Terminal (this should never HAVE to be used if Edubuntu ever hopes of capturing a significant population of educators) to install the Bluetooth tools and while I was not at all surprised to discover that the process didn't proceed as the howto described I was a little surprised to discover that the Bluetooth software was evidently already installed on my system. Nice!

So I tried to pair my phone and computer through the dongle. Everything's working fine, the comptuer shows up on my phone, but then my phone asks for the passcode. I try the default 0000 and it doesn't work. I try all other kinds of combinations in case I ever actually programmed a passcode into the thing and nothing works.

I go into Add/Remove... and add the Bluetooth tool for GNOME. No luck. I add the Bluetooth tools for KDE and my phone now shows up but it can't connect.

At this point I'm not sure what to do. I've googled and looked through forums and it seems like a pretty standard complaint. Now granted that Bluetooth still isn't quite ready for primetime (astounding considering how prevalent it is now) as even with XP I would have trouble getting all the features to work with my Bluetooth stereo headphones without proprietary software. In fact I imagine the trouble has as much to do with my phone as Edubuntu. Nevertheless, this is yet another case of me trying to expand the capability of my Edubuntu machine and falling into the time warp trap of googling, scanning forums, using the Terminal, etc. to try and get the new capability to work. None of those things should ever be necessary, and at the very least, shouldn't Edubuntu at least tell you that it has detected a dongle? At least it's Friday. -joe

I have a new focus

Okay, after a long time of trying to decide exactly what this blog would be about I guess I've decided to make it about open source in education. Specifically I will be dealing with issues associated with using Edubuntu in the classroom. I suppose I will still find time to contribute some personal information about myself, but I guess I'll try to title those ones "personal" or something. Mostly I guess I just don't care to have an online diary and would rather put my thoughts and frustrations trying to implement Edubuntu into the Internets so that maybe someone will find it useful and improve the product. So a few things:

Just yesterday I received our order for 35 8-port 10/100 ethernet switches. I plan on using them to setup Edubuntu LTSP miniLANs in every teachers classroom. I'm still waiting on the ethernet cords we ordered so it probably won't happen until next week some time. In the meantime though I'll probably have my tech crew (6 middle schoolers I have been training on tech stuff after school each week) at least start setting up the servers and thin clients in each teachers room.

I finally got the labs both set up. I have my own that has a bunch of donated P3 dell GX150s running at 800Mhz with 128MB RAM and the outside lab with a bunch of donated Compaq P2s running at like 333Mhz with 128MB RAM or something. Here are some pics of the process of setting up just the inside lab (in the pics are the Compaqs, I switched the computers after a few days so the better ones would be inside with me).







So on the first day I'm running 12 of the Compaqs in the inside lab computers off of a 3Ghz P4 Dell with 2GB DDR400 Dual Channel RAM and I have my first class of kindergarteners go to this alphabet flash game on the bbc site and the thin clients all run like molasses! I was so disappointed. I did have some extra ram so I bumped it up to 4GB but they still ran terribly. It was impossible for the students to do the assignment. After school I tried to go to the bbc game under Windows 2000 and it ran nearly as slow so I figured it had to do with the thin clients' processor and switched all the Compaq's with the Dell's with some help from the librarian and my Tech Crew. The problem seems to have been fixed a little bit, but when I watch the system monitor on the Server the CPU is pretty much maxed out with 12 thin clients. I think I need to look into getting a better server because I really want to do some cool stuff in the inside lab. I'm hoping to use kompozer for webpages and Google Earth and definitely some fun games for free time rewards. Plus, what if I want to use Kino or do some podcasts? So I'm not sure what the relationship is for what kind of servers and thin clients are needed for that level of computing but everything I read seemed to suggest that I had adequate levels of equipment. I'm guessing those sources were referring to simply being able to power the thin clients and to use them for any serious tasks would require more power, but this was never clearly stated and now I find myself in the unenviable position of needing another 3k or so to buy my new Dual Xeon server. Hopefully future guides will provide some sort of graph or chart to illustrate exactly what kinds of processes are capable of being executed with a given server/thin client setup. I know I would have appreciated one (still would!) Until next time. -joe