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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by Native Floridian on Monday 23/Jul/2001, @22:45
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As a Florida transplant currently living in Atlanta - I'm proud to see Florida taxpayer dollars put to such excellent work.
Maybe we could fenagle him to write a how-to? I'm sure his experiences would be invaluable to any corporate sysadmin looking to justify and show all the benefits of KDE+ / *NIX and the significant ROIs these types of installs have in the workplace.
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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by Guybrush Threepwood on Monday 23/Jul/2001, @23:37
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I'm not going anywhere near this place since that largo embargo.
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Office or day-care?
by kdeFan on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @00:36
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<<We would like the ability to turn off the feature that lets users pick their own wallpaper>>
Are you serious? You really don't trust the employees enough to choose an appropriate background image? I have to wonder if you're creating an environment where people with integrity will not want to work.
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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by not me on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @00:50
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Wow, that 11-12 MB per user surprised me. I guess X and shared libs are what is taking all my computer's RAM. How does that compare to the KDE 1 system that you guys had before?
Also, isn't it already possible to turn off things like the Quick Browser? I'm sure I saw that somewhere...
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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by Thomas on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @05:56
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> I had to put in code to redirect the sound to
> the thin clients. By default, KDE tries to
> send them to a sound card [..]
btw. the last time I checked out arts network transparency it did not work. I've a small network here running 5 clients with KDE2.1.1 (real PCs ... no X-terminals...) and I'd like to redirect the sound from the machines wo sound card to the only one with sound card.
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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by Adrian Bool on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @07:52
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Just curious about your use of rsh..
Do your users log into your servers using XDM,
so the full X session is from the server, with
only the X server running on the client box?
If that is the case, why is rsh needed?
Cheers,
aid
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How about LTSP?
by Janne on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @08:10
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Does anyone have experience running KDE on the Linux Terminal Server? What about large-slace deployments? Looking at the text seems to suggest that this project does not use LTSP.
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Re: City of Largo Adopts KDE 2.1.1
by Sheldon on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @12:14
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To restart kicker:
dcop kicker Panel "restart()"
Sheldon.
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rsh and sound problems.
by Jerome Loisel on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @14:12
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We run a similar (but much smaller) shop here: dumb X terminals running off a main application server with a KDE 2.X interface. It is working very well, but we use a different approach.
We use Jacques Gelinas' (of Linuxconf fame) diskless XTerminal kit. The kit does not use a "boot up a terminal and run applications in a server" approach. It uses a "boot up a terminal and transparently log in to the server" approach.
So starting konqueror from the command line works as expected. The only small hitch is that we have to use a VFS to give applications access to the terminal's disk drive. And some applications have a problem with that.
But overall, it is a very well-designed, simple solution. I recommend it to everyone who has the same needs.
http://www.solucorp.qc.ca/xterminals/
jerome at levinux dot org
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Network traffic
by brambi on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @18:17
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How about the network traffic. Is it a normal 100Mbit ethernet connection? Can one nic handle so much traffic (X, nfs, sound, surfing,...) ?
Bram.
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wow
by KDE User on Tuesday 24/Jul/2001, @21:21
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Thanks for your efforts Dave. This is amazing. It's impressive how one individual like you made a difference by deploying Linux/KDE.
I hope the KDE project learns from your experience and makes the next version of KDE even more suitable for the enterprise.
A synergy has started here, let's keep it well and alive!
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Dave Richard's e-mail
by Fabricio Abreu on Wednesday 25/Jul/2001, @00:53
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Can anyone tell me Dave Richard's e-mail account so that I can ask him how did he accomplish such wonderful task?
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Responses
by Dave Richards on Wednesday 25/Jul/2001, @12:19
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Our announcement to kde-devel has certainly gotten a lot of emails and comments. I appreciate the suggestions and thoughts. I haven't seen any people doing things the same way, because more people set up departmental servers, but instead we are running application servers. Each of our servers performs one function.
I read all of your comments, and will respond to the questions asked.
* Yes, I would love to help with a detailed how-to guide for this kind of rollout. The cost savings are just amazing. Anyone buy NT licenses yet for thin clients? They have dropped all concurrent licenses, and it's going to cost anyone that wants to use NT a fortune. Thankfully, we have always been mostly a Unix shop where concurrent prices are the norm. Centralized NT only supports about 40-50 on the same hardware that we can get hundreds on with Linux/Unix.
* Wallpapers. Anyone that has worked for Government understands our concerns. Not only can we get sued, but all it takes is one newspaper reporter coming in and seeing something, *anything* with which to write an article to sell papers. "City Employee Uses Taxpayer Dollars To Have Offensive Background". The 8 bit color thing is another issue, non-technical people have no idea what they are doing to their color cells. Wallpapers come up *first*, so your 256 colors are gone before any software is started. Also, people were picking wallpapers stored in NFS mounted drivers. It is unknown what happens to KDE when it tries to get wallpaper from an NFS mount that is down for whatever reason (reboot, etc). It might just *hang* and wait. Anyone ever try and do an ls in a mount that is down? Or 'df'?
* The 11MB of memory thing was good news for us. Being that memory has dropped so much, we can certainly accomodate that per user. Sticks of 1GB are about 1500 dollars, very cheap. KDE 1 running on Unixware was only a partial deployment in order to get them used to KDE for a few years until we installed this version. We only ran the kpanel only, window management came from the terminals. In KDE2, we are using 100% of KDE, window management is being done on the host.
* NAS is the sound system being used. NAS is client/server and works almost the same way that Xwindows does. The guys at NCD did a great job with it. It's available for free now. I know that some people have looked at doing a Win32 port of it (another question asked). I would suggest getting on the NAS list server and if you want to try and port it, that would be great.
* Network performance is fine, we are hardly using any of our network. The network really should be a major part of a white paper we make one. Xwindows needs realtime access to the servers, and some switches do store-and-forward which is tested and designed for client/server only. What it does is hold stuff for a good time to send them, which kind of doesn't work well when you are typing things and the keystrokes are going back and forth. ;) We have a Gig backbone, and fiber was run to all of the closets in the city, and then each closet has switched 3com 3900 devices. We don't have any hubs in the whole city. The switches automatically hide all of the broadcasts between switches. NAS works in realtime. In fact, we run the Realplayer over the network, and the sound and video are in sync.
* We use rsh because the big server only does KDE. One of the biggest things that people complain about with 'mainframes' is that if the mainframe is down, everything is down. So they way that you get around that is that you build applications servers. If one machine is down, or being rebooted, only one option from the Kpanel is inactive. Everything else works. Okay, so WordPerfect is down for 10 minutes, I'll read my email or check something on the web. From the user perspective, it looks like one big machine, but each icon choice is calling a different machine. The rsh sends the signals over to that machine to initiate a session and check to make sure that user has permissions to run that software. NT with Citrix accepts rsh commands and can start up software that way in an Xwindow via the UIS. This is really cool because it turns off the Windows Start bar and all options of NT. Only the software requested via the rsh is started.
My very old presentation at SCO Forum 99 is still out there-->
http://www.sco.com/skunkware/largo/
We have been running this design for about 7-8 years now, but the power of KDE has certainly given us a lot better front end for our users.
Regards!
Dave
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PC script
by zapalotta on Wednesday 25/Jul/2001, @21:39
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"What is happening is that people are installing their own wallpapers, and now I'm going to have to write a script to find all of them that are in use and check to make sure they are 'politically correct' in the workplace."
could you please post the PC-script, would be interesting to see ;-)
*SCNR*
anyways: great deal!
Regards,
DD
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Why are you telling KDE users
by Gavin on Thursday 16/Aug/2001, @10:24
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This is a great story, and I'm just itching to try implementing some sort of similar system at my school as well, if the monks there are at all interested.
but that's beside the point. This article (or maybe a flower tabbed suit-readable version sould be posted all over the place (i.e. newsites, etc). Also that would give me and others like me more written material to be used for petitioning governments and schools to use this superiour technology.
I'd write something myself, but I honestly don't have the time right now. I am currently using a city library computer, and windows has to be resarted faithfully every fifteen minutes. This is just one of the many places that desperatly needs to get rid of the curse.
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user-restrictions
by Admin on Sunday 04/Nov/2001, @11:40
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The KDE Kiosk Mode Howto at http://www.brigadoon.de/peter/kde/
has some patches to block certain functionality for users
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why thin client?
by Mohammed Arafa on Tuesday 03/Sep/2002, @07:11
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www.ltsp.org
any old pc with minimum 16mb of ram, no hard disk, no cd, no floppy, just a bootable eprom from rom-o-matic.net or pxe support and u got dummy terminals with ALL the apps on the server running locally.
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