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Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs? 267

Posted by Cliff from the penguins-in-public-places dept.
Benanov asks: "I'm doing a literature review on the Feasibility of Linux for a public-access lab (i.e. not Computer Science students at a university but instead the entire student body would have a login), and I haven't found any detailed studies about any places where this is actually done. If you know of any citeable sources about studies / reviews, I'd really appreciate it."
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Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs? More

Feasibility of Linux for Public-Access Labs?

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  • well not linux, but unix...I believe uw uses AIX and every student has a login...works very well for the 30,000 students.
    • While its true that we have 36,000 students using AIX for e-mail and the like here at the UW, we don't actually have any labs setup with machines running *nix (there is one RedHat lab for the CS students). I've been trying to convince my boss in the UW polisci lab to run linux for a year-plus, but he won't even let me setup a linux server to run mySQL. So, even though UW is home to such greats as Pine and IMAP, I'm sad to report almost all of our labs are Mac/Windows.

  • Isn't this basically what companies like Netcom and Compuserve did? Unix systems with large numbers of unrelated users all having logins. You'll need some sort of central directory for passwords (pam_ldap or something similar should work wonders there), but otherwise it sounds like what Unix-like systems have been doing for decades.

    • So the computers have it down pat, but how bout the 30k people who are gonna use them? How do you secure your boxes? These are workstations, not dumb terminals. You need workstation security, not just account security. You need a friendly interface that people will not be afraid of. You dont want to scare people off by giving them a complicated, unfamiliar user interface such as anything other than windows or macos.

      • So set up Gnome or KDE on the workstations, no admin privileges to any user accounts of course, with the home directories Coda-mounted and with things locked down per standard for an ISP's shell machines (ie. tighter than a nervous virgin clam). Minimal services running, don't install dangerous things like nmap, and give them a desktop skin that resembles Windows and an xdm/gdm/kdm login box. You only have to assemble the workstation image once, then just clone it over onto workstations as needed. Kernel modules and DHCP are your friend here.

        For extra evilness points, lock down their dot-files by making them owned by a special user and not writable by the account itself. This requires a bit of a balancing act, since some dot-files do need to be writable for storing state.

        This is the same process needed to secure the workstations used by the CS classes, you're just talking about several thousand workstations instead of several hundred. There's more administrative overhead, but the actual things needed for each workstation are roughly the same. Just be sure to have a beefy enough fileserver (or spread the load over several) to handle the network-mounted home directories.

  • Look for overlap with LTSP studies... (Score:3, Informative)

    by metacosm ( 45796 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:06PM (#3655582)
    I have setup a general access lab using linux and LTSP, but it was only for 16 highschool students, so I am not sure how relevant to your quest. I would recommend looking for studies regarding LTSP.
  • Well, it'd definitely be easy to set up and cheap to support, but on the downside, most of the programs people are going to want to use (at least average people) are Windows, or maybe Mac, programs. I guess having a well-installed copy of Wine might help with that, but it does seem like a major problem. Also, there would be the small hurdle of the users being a little confused by Linux, but that would go away pretty quickly.

    • Or, let 'em use the Linux equivalents and be happy. I have a friend who's not much of a geek who's been using Linux for over a year now with few problems. Her biggest problem is the fact that HR departments _demand_ Word documents. :-(

    • since you would need to install windows anyways to get these windows programs you wanted to work in wine, why not just use windows in the first place?
    • In my experience, most people go to the computer labs to check email, browse the web, or code. It's much more comfortable writing a paper in your room or at a library.

      That said, you could do what they do at my school (where no labs are CS only) -- install Linux on 3/4 or 1/2 of the computers at the front of the lab and make the rest Windows machines. For those who want to check their email or browse the web, there's about a one-minute learning curve. For those who want to write papers, they can go to the quieter back.

    • Re:Good and bad (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MrResistor ( 120588 )
      Having been responsible for a school computer lab, I say screw those users. They can use what I offer them or they can go somewhere else. I lost count of the number of times I had to re-image my relatively few machines because some idiot decided they absolutely had to have AIM (which hosed one of the math programs we used, which was the actual purpose of the lab).

      What are open school labs for? Internet chat? No. Games? No. The purpose of open labs is to provide computers for people who can't afford their own so they can get their work done. That means word processing, spreadsheets, maybe some web browsing. All of those things can be done using Linux and various free packages. They need to edit or print out their MS Word document that they wrote at home? OpenOffice will do that just fine. The only problem I've ever had with it handling MS documents was some wrong background colors in an Excel spreadsheet, which is easily fixed.

      As for the confusion, that's what lab assistants are for. "That icon is the web browser, that one is the word processor..." Quick and easy, and exactly the sort of brain dead stuff every lab assistant has to deal with all day, every day, regardless of Operating System.

      For the few people who absolutely have to have Windows or Mac programs, have a few specialized labs set up for them. That's neither new nor different in a college environment, where just about every department has at least a small lab with some computers set up for the specific needs of the students taking those classes.

      If a student wants to use a program not offered in the open lab, they can go find the department that would use that software and make an arrangement, or they can get their own damn computer.

      • I'll admit that student computing environments have changed since I was an undergrad - one of the geek fraternities had their own keypunch, but everybody else had to come up to campus to access computers. :-)
        Not every college student has a computer, and not every computer is a laptop, and not every laptop has a wireless LAN card (though the latter's become affordable, if the college has the access points). The jobs of an open lab have changed a lot from the days when most work was on terminals connected to a big shared machine, and they'll keep changing as technology changes the affordability and portability of the average student's computing resources, and y'all in the academic-staff business will have to keep hopping, reinventing yourselves, and getting new budgets approved.

        So what are they for now?

        • Computing with lab assistants, whether they're class-specific TAs or computing-center assistants.
        • Collaborative work! Once you've finished Programming 100 and maybe Data Structures 200, much of the important classwork isn't individual - it's either explicitly collaborative projects, or at least study-groups working together on homework, and until everybody's got a wireless laptop, open labs are the most convenient place to do that. Also, if your project involves doing major changes to a machine's operating system, you're not going to do that on your main PC, you're going to do it on a lab machine which can be wiped and rewritten, or at very least on a removable drive.
        • Computing near classes - most universities are large enough that dorms aren't right next to classrooms, and campuses are large enough that academic buildings aren't all within a 5-minute walk of each other.
        • High-speed network access - many campuses have ethernets or dsl or similar LANs in their dorms, but many don't, and many students don't live in dorms, especially non-freshmen.
        • Specialized resources - unlike a few years ago, most interesting projects really _can_ be done with an individual's PC with a fast net connection to appropriate local file servers, but there really are still projects that need larger machines, or special hardware.

      • I lost count of the number of times I had to re-image my relatively few machines because some idiot decided they absolutely had to have AIM (which hosed one of the math programs we used, which was the actual purpose of the lab).

        I never got used to AIM, but I can image that it is a very good educational tool. I used to use finger & [y]talk all the time as an undergrad to quickly talk with friends about a project requirement, test date, etc. These days few machines allow finger and AIM has replaced it.

        Couldn't you install some AIM client that doesn't screew things up and point users to it? I know there is a Java client, I can't imagine that being very evil...
        • The lab I was working on was not really an open lab, it actually wasn't even primarily a computer lab, but we had some. It was a math lab, and the purpose of the computers was to run some educational programs; in particular we were experimenting with PC-based algebra classes.

          We lab personel often allowed people to use the computers for other purposes such as writing papers and such, mostly because the school was actually a little short on open lab computers, and it wasn't uncommon for those labs to be full. The only people who knew about the computers in the math lab were people who used the math lab for its intended purpose, so we figured it was OK.

          Allowing chat clients was way out of the scope of the lab, and given that the PC algebra coursework was supposed to be done individually, it was actually antithetical to the main purpose of those computers. Additionally, the lab had a strict policy against users installing software of any kind. I managed to get permission to install SETI@home clients on a few of them (it was a math lab, after all, and SETI is doing some pretty cool math). I couldn't get the clients to run right on those machines because they had crappy monitors that wouldn't do 800x600, and they couldn't handle it running as a background process, so it was a relatively short-lived experiment.

          The fact that it wasn't installed by us was a big part of the problem. It was students who were installing it, and they wanted AIM. If we'd had aanther AIM-compatable client installed, they probably would have downloaded and installed AIM anyway. I never saw anybody using for potentially legitimate uses like you describe, but even if they were they still should have gone to an open lab and used one of those PCs rather than tying up one that somebody else needs to get their classwork done.

          Also, this was in the AOL5.0 days. At that time every lab tech I knew had nightmares revolving around AOL software. It caused all kinds of problems. I don't recall there being a significant amount of alternative or compatible clients around at the time. Basically you had AIM, ICQ, or maybe IRC if you were a 1337 h4x0r, and they were pretty much discrete. (I don't mean any offense to IRC users, that's just the best description of the few people I knew that used it)

      • Absolutely agree. I will add one thing here-- the learning curve is about 1 min for common tasks if the desktop is properly configured (even with GNOME 1.0-- not picking on GNOME, but its interface came a long way).

        Case in point-- my parents were lost with Windows 95. I put together a RedHat 6.1 system (now running 7.1) and they stopped calling me for tech support, and they started using their computer more :)

        The point is that the users of a computer center (or my parents, for that matter) don't want to be administrators of the system, and they don't need to install much software, so the fact that Linux requires a little more knowledge to do these things minimally is not an issue.

        Anyway, I know that this is not what you are looking for-- I wish you the best of luck in finding quotable studies.
    • cytrix has a software package to connect to a win2k server...its basically a fancy fancy vnc server/client software set.

      So the idea is you need to do productivity stuff...you fire up the virtual desktop from a central win2k server..and view it on the lab computer.

      So know you only have to maintain that one central win2k server ( its 2 backups ) instead of a whole lab of windows machines.... of course the licensing issues in this are um...interesting.

      -jef

    • Re:Good and bad (Score:2, Interesting)

      by EvilTwinSkippy ( 112490 )
      I run a 200 person windows network and would trade it in a second for Linux. First and foremost: Windows is NOT all that easy to use. Our help desk has to do just about everything for our users from setting up printers to bailing their asses out of locked programs. People do not know Windows nearly as well as the industry would have us believe. (Or MS Office for that matter, If I get one more request for a manual I am going to scream.)

      As far as programs they are going to want to use:

      • Mozilla makes a great Mail and Web client. Plus the interface is wonderful, consistent, and can be upgraded over an entire network with a shell script.
      • Office Applications. MS Office, while widely used, is not very well understood by the common user. As long as you can provide something that will read Office documents, print, and spell check, they will barely notice. I have all of 5 users who know how to do more than spell check in Word. 3 of them work for the Help Desk.
      • Beyond that are games and annoyances like Instant Messaging and (grrr) bonsai buddy. Do you really want people tying up workstations with that?
  • I don't know what research has been performed, but UofM has a huge number of dual-boot (redhat/win2k) workstations around north campus which are available for general use. Mostly used by engineering students, but I suspect they've done some research on going further. Look around their website and ask their computing services people.

    -Adam
    • Assuming you mean U of Michigan and not Minnesota or Mississippi, it's worth noting that they used to have lots of security issues; I recall having students at Bradley University running crack against the password/shadow files from UMich way back in the day.

      As far as it goes, Bradley has used Unix machines (originally AT10 years). I suppose it's possible that they stopped that practice, but I doubt it. Go poking around www.bradley.edu and look for Computer or Computing Services to find contact information, I'm sure they'd be willing to talk to you about how they deal with the issues that come up in giving shell accounts to naive users.

      • Bah, I hate HTML formatting. That parenthetical thing that says "AT10 years" was supposed to be "AT&T SVR3, then SVR4, then Solaris....I dunno if they'd have moved on to Linux by now or not) for a long time now (> 10 years)"

  • CMU (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Carnegie Mellon University has labs of Linux, NT, Apple, and Sun machines - all using the same login / password, and accessible to everyone.

  • "You mean... (Score:2, Funny)

    by Jonboy X ( 319895 )
    ...I can't play minesweeper? What kind of lab is this?"
  • Wouldn't this be very similar to the practice of having everyone log in on a traditional Unix, like the HP AIX we used at my university [calpoly.edu] until the mid '90s? Are you talking about more than email access? Is this supposed to be a full-featured desktop for writing reports and creating presentations?

    I'm intrigued by the idea, but please clarify some activities anticipated on these computers.

  • linux k12 project (Score:2, Informative)

    by ohchaos ( 564646 )
    I'd highly reccomend you look over at the linux k12 project @ http://www.riverdale.k12.or.us/linux/

  • DNALounge uses Linux kiosks for the public (Score:5, Informative)

    by dzm ( 319609 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:11PM (#3655628) Homepage
    Jamie Zawinski has produced a nice document describing how he did it, problems he faced, etc.

    [LINK] [dnalounge.com]
  • all 30,000+ purdue students can login to a unix shell (via telnet/ssh/pc-xware), and that works without a problem. Only students in certain classes (CS courses, mainly) have access to the labs where all the Sun machines are.
    • All 14,000 or so RIT students can login to a UNIX shell, and I wish it worked without a problem. I have 'echo "some@address.com" >> .forward' for more people than I can count. People don't like UNIX shells. People don't want UNIX shells. People want eye candy and web interfaces.
  • What applications are going to be available? If it's just a library where people are websurfing, then I don't see what the big deal would be. If they're going to do a lot of office-type stuff, then I expect the big problem will be file formats. They're going to want to take their term paper or their lab results home and use them in Excel or Word, and even if the filters are available, they may be befuddled by it.

  • Redhat (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Any default install of Redhat on any computer with an always on connection is plenty public, i.e., anybody on the net can use them ;-)

    • Re:Redhat (Score:3, Insightful)

      by tempest303 ( 259600 )
      I know this was meant to be "funny" but the last few releases of RH ship with basically everything off by default except for an ssh-server. And if ya can't trust OpenSSH, what CAN you trust? :)

  • MIT (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The Athena system here at MIT runs both on Sun and Linux boxes. Extensive use of certificates and kerberos here. Supposedly very secure...

  • TU Darmstadt (Score:2, Insightful)

    by kippy ( 416183 )
    The Technical University of Darmstadt [tu-darmstadt.de] had quite a few dual-boot Linux/Windows machines in public labs. This was 3 years ago so I don't know if this is still the case.
  • When I went to school at Indiana, they had 'public access' UNIX labs in some of the buildings around campus. Not Linux, but Solaris and IRIX. Though they were mainly geared for graphics and CS students, anyone could get an account just be applying on a web page. I think that is a good approach to getting initial interest in the Linux labs. Start small (a couple dozen machines), put productivity software, graphics and science apps on the machines. And let people begin to use them at their leisure. If your school is anything like mine was, there are always a shortage of available public PCs and you'll find that students who wouldn't normally show up at the Linux lab, will just come for the open PCs. Make sure the lab is staffed with people who can translate from Windows to Linux, and gradually you'll gain acceptance and begin to spread out the labs.

    • Trust & familiarity (Score:4, Interesting)

      by s20451 ( 410424 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:27PM (#3655776) Journal
      There's a small library near my office where there are four public access terminals. Historically they all ran Windows, but just for a laugh the sysadmin put Linux on one of them; and the users avoided the Linux machine like it was radioactive. They didn't seem to like the "weird" web browsers that it came with (Opera and Mozilla), and they had a hard time adapting to the application launcher, however trivially it seemed to differ from the Windows "Start" button. Non-technical people prefer familiarity and ease of use above all else when using a computer.
  • Carnegie Mellon University's Cluster services [cmu.edu] maintains general student body access Linux and Solaris machines as well as Windows and MacOS. Don't know of any studies, offhand, but it doesn't hurt to look.

  • Make it user-friendly. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by generic-man ( 33649 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:16PM (#3655678) Homepage Journal
    Carnegie Mellon has a large network for about 5,000 current undergrads, 1,000 current graduate students, and hundreds of staffers (not to mention 'miscellaneous' accounts). Most people use it to log into Windows or Macintosh systems on campus, since that's what they're used to. Furthermore, the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible. Among other things, it completely ceases to work if NUM LOCK is on. There's been talk about switching over to GNOME as the default, but as of now people have to ask each other how to switch to Windowmaker, FVWM, or the current GNOME environment.

    One time early in the academic year, I noticed a user had forgotten to log out. In the xterm that had been opened with mwm, I saw:

    % netscape

    % netscape

    % netscape

    % netscape

    % aol
    bash: aol: command not found
    % aol
    bash: aol: command not found
    % aol.com
    bash: aol.com: command not found
    % aol.com
    bash: aol.com: command not found
    % netscape.com
    bash: netscape.com: command not found

    Make all the jokes you want about LARTing the newbies, but there were absolutely no options on screen. Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris. IE for Solaris is lackluster compared to Windows, Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it), GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop, and StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.
    • ...no solid equivalents for popular...software packages on Linux...Mozilla is still unreliable...StarOffice is still nowhere close...

      This is just plain crazy. Moz1.0 and OpenOffice1.0 are both incredibly solid, full featured, and more than acceptably compatible.

      I run a team of programmers who have to submit pretty documents to a company full of folks who use nothing but MS; we run Linux for development purposes and have zero significant issues going back and forth between Word and OpenOffice1.0.

    • Furthermore, the default window manager on Linux and Solaris is mwm (Motif Window Manager), which is absolutely horrible. Among other things, it completely ceases to work if NUM LOCK is on. There's been talk about switching over to GNOME as the default, but as of now people have to ask each other how to switch to Windowmaker, FVWM, or the current GNOME environment.

      How did you get rated so high? First you claim that thousands of people use this system at Carnegie Mellon to somehow justify it as a well designed network. Then you spout off the above load of BS. First mwm is not the default window manager on linux or solaris and hasn't been for years. Maybe back in the days of SunOS 4.x, but anything written in the last 5 years has been using CDE, Enlightenment, Windowmaker, KDE, GNOME, etc. The last two can look and feel an aweful lot like those windows and macs. And where did you come up with the NUM LOCK problem? Linux boxes are surprisingly stable and cheap and can run hundreds of users off of one box. They can remotely display their desktop to windows and macs as well as other unix boxes natively. They can share files with windows, macs and unix boxes easily from default installs and include all the software necessary to automate the process of moving and managing your data out of the box. Perhaps Carnegie Mellon and its supposed computer scientists don't know anything about computers or how to use them but that gives no excuse to your post. Please link to sites that can't be drawn by mozilla and give reasons for the problems with the Gimp, StarOffice, KDE and GNOME and why people, university students, would have trouble using said software. Oh and in the example of a nightmare user experience in mwm can you tell me why netscape was never displayed? It sounds to me like either you made all this up or nobody has administrated your unix network in the last 5 years. Since your post is about improving the usability of Linux do you have any suggestions?
    • Mozilla is still unreliable and doesn't render some sites properly (they were designed for IE; live with it)

      This is a small minority. Are those few pages really worth keeping on the Windows upgrade treadmill?

      GIMP is no substitute for Photoshop

      Not for professionals, but for many people it's more than enough. So buy a few workstations with Photoshop, and let the GIMP do its thing on the rest of the machines: being "good enough" instead of a full replacement.

      StarOffice is still nowhere close to Microsoft Office.

      In terms of what? Have you really used the latest StarOffice/OpenOffice.org packages? Yes, MS Office does have larger feature set, but how many of those features that StarOffice doesn't have really get used?

    • Furthermore, there are no solid equivalents for popular Windows or Macintosh software packages on Linux or Solaris.

      Spoken like someone who has no idea what they are talking about. I use Linux every day all day. Mozilla (Galeon) for browsing, OpenOffice for editing documents that are also edited by colleagues running MSOffice on Windows, gaim for instant messaging, samba for accessing Windows shares, Evolution for email, etc. etc.

      What other applications are they likely to require again? Sure, if they need to run some specialized app that is written for Windows (and won't run under Wine) then maybe you might have a problem. Other than that, can the FUD.

  • Maybe I was a bit confused by what you are asking, but if you are talking about public computer terminals, running a *nix, where all students have the ability to login and use the computer, Vanderbilt University does this. Not only are there several Windows computers on the campus that will enable any student to login and access his or her online storage space and the internet and whatever applications are available on that particular machine, but there are several iMacs and *nix (running some gui, not sure which one or what distro) computers as well. Did I completely miss the ball on this one? I only read it briefly.

  • Simple End User Linux (Score:4, Informative)

    by CBNobi ( 141146 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:21PM (#3655714)
    The SEUL [seul.org] is an organization for using Linux for education. There's even a case study [seul.org] section.
  • I used to work at UC Irvine and my group was in charge of a public access lab where we used linux machines as X-terminals so that way people could log into any machine serving X11 sessions on the campus network.
    One issue that the admistration had was the users breaking into the machines. We auto-spawned X sessions and used the restrict flag in LILO (which allows no special options to be passed to the kernel at boot time e.g linux init=/bin/sh) and we never had any problems. Of course, we also patched the machines whenever there were local or remote security holes via an automated patching system.
    Another good idea might be to have the machines reboot, mount a miniroot at night and copy their os partitions over from a central server, similar to what I've seen norton ghost do on windows boxen.

    and of course, you can use them for the obligatory parallel computing tasks during the night :)

  • Project Athena (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mauler ( 251965 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:22PM (#3655721)
    What you're describing has been the way
    things have worked at MIT for the last
    18 years (although with various Unixi,
    now including Linux) starting with Project
    Athena in the early 80's. Athena is where
    we get X Windows and Kerberos.
  • I can't remember the exact figure, but at a recent Canberra Linux User Group, I was quite surprised at the number of Redhat boxes that a IT team member at ANU mentioned he had deployed (In the hundereds).

    I suspect that with this number, things have moved beyond the computer science department.

    Quote from a older article:

    • "The key feature of Linux is that it is very robust as a result. This means fewer crashes and problems than most other operating systems," Mr Bob Edwards, of the Computer Science Department in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology, said.

      He said the strong background in Linux at the ANU made it an ideal environment in which to become an expert programmer.

      "We provide Linux laboratories for students to work on, the staff use Linux and in 2000 we won the Gordon Bell Prize for the fastest Linux machine in the world -- Bunyip," Mr Edwards said. "

    ANU - also the home of Tridge from SAMBA, and the Bunyip Beowulf project (http://tux.anu.edu.au/Projects/Beowulf/)
  • Just kidding...

    Well, at Columbia, they have all these dumb terminals, which run Linux and an X session. They're not bad for checkin' yer mail, but they don't allow you to do much else. For some application where the types of software needed are very limited, I think that it's prolly great.

    For the real computers labs, for the non-cs types, they are mostly Windows (NT or some such) or Mac. The NT machines are pretty well locked-down and something like this would be quite easy to achieve; it would probably even be more secure (well maybe) with Linux.

    I guess the real thing is choosing software. OpenOffice is alright, but I don't know if random people are actually going to want to write papers with it. I mean, I have, but...well...people might have some issues with their floppies. That's probably the biggest thing. Dang floppies.

    You should really use DOS and WordPerfect 5.1, maybe Lotus 1-2-3.

  • UTD Does It. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by saveth ( 416302 ) <cww@denAAAterpri ... inus threevowels> on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:23PM (#3655735)
    The University of Texas at Dallas [utdallas.edu] does it. There is a lab full of Red Hat Linux computers and Sun Ray terminals.

    Though their web site [utdallas.edu] is a bit sparse on details, you could probably shoot an email to a member of the staff [utdallas.edu]. They're friendly people, and I'm sure they'd be willing to help you out.
  • You have an advantage in that there are less Linux viruses for your users to inflict on the system, and less 'BonzaiCometGators' as well. This situation could well change in the near future though, as viruses like simile [virusbtn.com] are now cross-platform...
    • 'BonzaiCometGators' Those programs have been constantly installed on our computer lab systems that run Windows NT. Apparently, there is no possible way to prevent software from being installed on the local systems and starting up automatically. Even if the user does not have any admin passwords they can still install junk programs on the machines. We end up having to reimage systems all the time because of this.

  • Anser: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by 7-Vodka ( 195504 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:25PM (#3655755) Journal
    Very feasable. My gf wanted to use my computer. I did a quick adduser and told her to log in.
    She's your average windows user, don't ask her about hardware or drivers she just wants browse the web etc.
    She had no trouble logging in through kdm.
    she had no trouble using the default kde3 setup. All this with no help from me (i wasn't even watching)
    She can check her email, browse the web, listen to music and print stuff out (thanks cups + kdeprint).

    A couple of months went by, I haven't watched her use it at all...
    I asked her the other day, so how do you like linux?
    her answer: "It's just like using windows" and "I like the way it looks".

    Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.

    • Seems to me unsophisticated users aren't able to set up a kde3 box but they are sure able to use one.
      Quite true. I helped get someone else started with Linux-based library and high school labs last year. KDE was more popular than MS-Windows in the labs that still had a MS-Windows machine or two.

      Even relatively unsophisticated users can help out with routine maintenance. Plan to be able to allow an automated method (net or CD) to restore default files and configurations or to do a fresh install. This allows people with relatively few technical skills to restore machines or put the icons back.

      Don't forget to put a password on the bootloader and / or BIOS so that it's less easy to fiddle with the machine. You want it to boot up normally from the HD or net each time, but not allow custom kernel parameters or booting from the CD, floppy, or unintended places on the net. You may also want to mount some or all of the local file systems read only, to slow the rate of decay. Suse, RedHat, and Mandrake are better each time, but all still have a lot of extra (troublesome) packages mixed in with the default installation. Keep user profiles and home directories on the file server(s).

      Find out what the students will be doing and pick relevant packages (Mozilla, Opera, XMMS, xpdf) and be sure to pick out relevant default settings. A lot of the principles listed on Jakob Nielsens's web site [useit.com] are relevant for a desktop as well.

      One university I saw last fall in Norway had all of their "MS-Windows" machines running Linux with Metaframe or Wine or something, so that's a good work around for legacy apps like MS-Excel. The University of Michigan has one of the better computing environments I've seen.

  • IIT did this while I was there (maybe before I signed up). Of course, it's a smaller uni, but everyone had a computer login. There were two labs for all students. One was PC, open access, connected to a Novell server. It was used mostly for typing reports. The other lab (in the basement) was direct terminals (pre-vt100) to our intranet (keep in mind, this is 10 years ago). Originally, everyone has an account for email on an acient VAX (ugh, the nightmares). However, after a few years, the bought several vt-320s and moved everyone's account to an Irix server (what a waste). Most people had a standard account name that was used for email (mostly between friends; teachers had no clue how to use it). The formula they used was first 4 characters of last name plus first 3 characters of first name. When a conflict arose, they added 1, 2, etc. I don't think I saw amything beyond 8 characters ever, but many people had shorter ids. It seemed to work well in practice.


    We also had pretty fast access to the internet - no port blocking; too many Mud players (me included) and a few Muds that ran on school property (eventually went away; cool admin left). Man, those were nthe days.

  • You may want to check out MIT's project Athena (Academic Computing at MIT). They have been using UNIX machines for the student-wide computing environment which includes all different kinds of applications (word processors, spreadsheets, CAD software, scientific applications, programming environments, instant messenging). There is also a Linux and a NetBSD version of the Athena environment.

    I haven't been following the developments but I believe they were looking into introducing more Linux machines in the computer labs and enriching the Athena environment by adopting GNOME.

    Perhaps some current MIT student can provide more information.

    Here's some links:

    An overview [mit.edu]

    A dated article from the MIT student newspaper [mit.edu].

    An FTP server [mit.edu] where you can download the Athena software (MIT license)

  • MIT's Athena [mit.edu] computing environment runs on Dell Linux boxes, Sun workstations, and a few IRIX machines, and accounts are granted to all students. These *nix machines, with the exception of a small media cluster, are the only public machines available.

  • What's so new about ...x in public labs? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by magi ( 91730 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:28PM (#3655781) Homepage Journal
    For more than 10 years, practically all university students have gotten a UNIX login, and universities have been full of public terminals for students in labs and in hallways. In some richer universities, they have even had *oooh* X-terminals.

    The machines have usually been Sun, but I don't think Linux would be overwhelmingly different from them...

    So forgive me if I don't quite understand the question. UNIX has been a feasible solution for all students for years, and there's little reason to believe Linux wouldn't be.
  • The TCC (Tech Computer Center) has every workstation set up to boot into either win95 (the school has no funding to upgrade) or a semi-custom flavor of Linux. The Linux works well, except for the fact that you have to know how to use SaMBa to print from Linux...

    Also, to type papers or anything office related, one has to use windows....

    It works well, but would work better if anyone cared to allow easy printing under Linux...

  • 5 Years Old and counting (Score:4, Informative)

    by colonel ( 4464 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:32PM (#3655803) Homepage
    The Carleton University EngSoc [engsoc.org] Project is a wholly student-owned and student-run UNIX network at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. Once the largest Linux userbase in the world, they've provided Linux shell accounts to every undergraduate Engineering student for at least 7 years.

    Since 1996, they've offered a Public Access Lab using donated hardware and space provided by the University. They started off using 486 machines that booted RedHat 3 and NFS mounted from a blazing P90. Then they moved on to using NCD X-Terms. In 1998, Corel Computer donated Netwinder systems for use as the PAL workstations. In 2000, the lab sustained water damage from construction on the roof, and the Netwinders were replaced with ThinkNIC thin clients.

    But we don't have any useful literature to provide.

    • for at least 7 years

      Heh, yeah I guess so. I graduated in 1997, and I think I got my first account in the summer of 1995, between 2nd and 3rd year. A real shell account - much better than than I got from CHAT - and a SLIP dialup so I could run Mozilla from home. I even helped write some of the first FAQ - how to use passwd to change your password, etc.

  • My university uses this already in the Agora (Lakehead U, ON). Pretty popular workstations, and very stable.

  • Cambridge PWF (Score:3, Informative)

    by perky ( 106880 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:34PM (#3655810)
    The University of Cambridge [cam.ac.uk] have a system called the public workstation facility. This is comprised of machines in many departments and colleges which can authenticate against a single database, and which provide homespace and so on. I understand that some of these machines are now dual boot between NT/win2k and a home grown linux. More infomation is here [cam.ac.uk].

  • Tips (Score:3, Funny)

    by BoneFlower ( 107640 ) <anniethebruce.gmail@com> on Thursday June 06, 2002 @06:34PM (#3655812) Journal
    1) Use Mandrake. Its the simplest install, and in an educational setup the extra apps that it has can be beneficial, also, due to the wide range of users, having all of Mandrakes bloat can help people find programs that they will find useful.

    2) Use KDE/GNOME. Ideally, set it up to boot into X, have KDE/GNOME both installed and the users can select the one they want.

    3) Lock down permissions tighter than a Vatican nun.

    These tips will produce a perfectly usable system, fairly sturdy against morons trying to(or accidentally) screw up the system or introduce viruses or what have you. And make sure to review the logs, paying special attention to those who use the root account, either with su or by directly logging in
  • I don't know, at first this seems like the perfect place for Linux. It's inexpensive, morally superior, the list goes on.

    But this is a situation where Linux's power might be its undoing. In the physical presence of a Linux box, it is trivial for someone with the proper experience to boot into single-user mode, change the root password, and bam. Suddenly they are sitting in front of the most powerful hacking machine available outside the Pentagon.

    Result? Linux gets to be associated even more with hacking, and the spooks start taking an interest in our favorite OS (Linux). And that is some scruteny we don't want, thanks.

    In this context, I think shelling out for Windows is the best bet.
  • The public computer labs in my university [www.mun.ca] already do this. They dual boot windows and mandrake, but I see more people who just log into KDE rather than reboot into windows.

    pmj
  • The University of Bonn has labs full of computers running SuSE. I was there a couple of years ago. I'm not sure how the students liked it, but after a look at the setup it seemed it was probably much easier to administer. Most people only used the lab for the web.
  • University of Maryland has both the WAM [umd.edu] and GLUE [umd.edu] systems. The WAM labs are computer labs for any student on campus, regardless of major and include a wide range of platforms both in open labs and via dialup. The unix systems arekerberized and share user directories via AFS (Andrew File System). The GLUE labs are a similar architecture but mainly for the use of engineering students. Both projects are production systems but are partially run as research projects in the Comp. Sci. or Engineering departments.

    I used to work in the WAM and GLUE labs when I was an undergrad at UMCP, and the folks that managed the systems were pretty friendly, if you can get contact info for the current WAM sysadmins, they can probably give you better pointers. In the mean time, there is a page giving useage statistics [umd.edu] for the WAM/GLUE cluster.

  • Here at MIT, there is a system in place that allows access to any public machine for anybody with credentials. All remote software is under /mit, with homedirs being /mit/user/.../.../xxx. Authentication is Kerberos, remote filespace is AFS. It's called Athena. It's available for Solaris, Irix and Linux, with Solaris and Irix being phased out. Basically it's a RH system with a boatload of custom rpms. Some of the neater ones do auto-updating, so that you can go from a RH6.2 based Athena system to RH7.1 based overnight, no intervention required. Since all user data is remote, it works great. We(biology,biomicro,bioinformatics) are taking this system and making it more usable. A kickstart script gets the latest RH plus updates for installation. Homedirs and maintenance dirs are on nfs, and with kickstarts %postinstall section, a system can be customized perfectly right during install. I recommend this route, as you can add any rpms you want to be installed, and any scripts that you want executed.
  • check out www.k12LTSP.org. these guys have been doing all sorts of labs for the Portland, OR area schools..


  • From my distant memories of the dummy terminals at the University of North Dakota's CS department, one person starting a series of forked processes can leave a big hurt on everyone. Not that the setup would be anything like the server-terminal configuration at UND, or that there won't defenses against such problems... but users will find, either directly or indirectly, ways to at least take down individual systems down due to the freedom that such systems have to allow to be useful to a general audience.

    That said, Windows and other public systems have all these problems too. If you've ever been in a general student computer lab more than a few times, there's just going to be dead systems every few dozen chairs. You're still going to want to scan any writable medium you've used on the system for malicious programs before you use it after bringing it home, and there's still just going to be problems with the configuration acting differently than even experienced users expect.

    The only way I can see to truly prevent many types of problems in a public setting would be to not allow user executables, have a limited interface for most users, and logically ensure that at no path along the bootup, use, and shutdown of a system can a user do anything outside of expected things with the system. That means no boot-from-CD or disk, no systems with access to BIOS settings on bootup, etc, until after login to ensure security - which is likely not possible with most hardware.

    Anyway, I have no suggested solution - just issues I see with any public system, including Linux ones. They're not big issues either, considering that most public systems now seem to work fine with their limited security. But not all the advantages touted for Linux will be automatically present in a public system!

    :^)

    Ryan Fenton
  • As others have pointed out, for the basics it's no big deal. RTF covers a multitude of sins in the document translation world.

    Where I used to live, the local library's public systems were (afaik still are) run on Win98. They were hideously unstable (Netscape had a habit of locking out input and requiring restarts). Where I live now, the libraries run Win2k; it's still Windows, but at least it works.

    I suggested to the librarians a couple of times that they could run Linux, but both of the tech librarians that I knew were unfriendly and bitchy types, and one of them I got into a heated argument with over a small issue of file translation. Pretty typical of the entire fscking town, if you ask me...

    /Brian

  • AFS or NFS (Score:4, Informative)

    by gviamont ( 522953 ) <gviamont@eecs.umich.edu> on Thursday June 06, 2002 @07:10PM (#3656068) Homepage
    The University of Notre Dame [nd.edu] and University of Michigan [umich.edu] both use an AFS/Kerberos set-up for large volumes of accounts.
    Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university. Michigan's CAEN [umich.edu] is also an AFS/Kerberos system for the whole College of Engineering.

    MIT's Athena project is pretty interesting (and also partially uses an AFS/Kerberos scheme), but it probably won't help you set up a quick public network of Linux machines since it focuses more on the research side of things (not to mention the fact that it's been actively worked on since 1983!).

    In general, you will probably want to decide between an AFS/Kerberos set-up or an NFS set-up.

    With AFS/Kerberos, you as the administrator would directly control a pool of servers ("Vice") which physically contain the data in every user's account. The client machines ("Venus") would get temporary "tickets" from the central Kerberos server (which you also control) to access their accounts which are stored on Vice.
    In the NFS scenario, the physical location of accounts is totally decentralized and distributed across all the machines that users actually work on. This means less work for you as an administrator, but it also means less security since random users' data is actually stored on the disks of the computers in the user pool (in AFS, Vice machines are considered to be "locked in closets" to which only the administrators have physical access). It's good to remember a golden rule, "physical access to a computer always implies root access." Using a tomsrtbt disk for example, you can change the root password on just about any Linux machine with a floppy drive.

    Since Vice (in the AFS scheme) computers are presumably kept behind locked doors, you avoid this type of problem. However, AFS is harder to maintain, and you probably have to pay Transarc for a commercial version.

    For more info on AFS/Kerberos and NFS, I recommend surfing the ACM Digital Library [acm.org], in which you can find the seminal papers on these various technologies (if you're an ACM member and have access). You may also be able to find case studies there (which I found to be surprisingly hard to find on the web).
    • Notre Dame offers accounts on their Solaris/SPARC machines to every student at the university.

      I hope they don't offer public console access to their SPARC boxes (Stop-A/Stop-N is your friend).

  • dna lounge (Score:2, Informative)

    by gnu ( 73486 )
    The DNA Lounge, a night club in San Francisco, uses public terminals running linux. He has his source code on the website for the club.

    http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/

  • Penn State (Score:2, Interesting)

    by AaronPSU79 ( 536655 )
    Right now the public computer labs here are W2K and Mac's with a few public unix labs. No one uses the unix labs except engineers and cs guys. Most people don't use the Mac's unless all the windows machines are occupied. So I think among the general student population you're gonna have a hard time getting people using Linux unless a) they are forced to or b) you provide training to incoming students on how to use it and see thats its incorporated into classes.
  • If you're really serious about this, try this hole in the wall [greenstar.org]

    You might want to configure a wiki to give people a persistent platform on which to post their views and organize their information.

    phpwiki [sourceforge.net] can even organize wiki pages into community calendars.

    Go for it!

    I run my own community wiki [packet.org] as my part for defeating the bandwidth whores and content killing IP pimps at their own game.

  • Anectodal evidence but... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Random Feature ( 84958 ) on Thursday June 06, 2002 @09:41PM (#3657091) Homepage
    it's interesting.

    We moved our 15 year old son to a SuSE distribution last year. He had issues because he wasn't sure how to get to his network drives and couldn't get Starcraft running, but after a couple months he was able to install Wine and get Warcraft going (didn't get Starcraft going, much to his dismay).

    Four months ago we moved our 8 year old daughter to the same SuSE distro - took away her Windows 98 and made her quit cold turkey. We configured KMail and let her go. She's had NO help and she can create documents, print web pages, browse, and runs some of the KDE games. No complaints from her at all.

    So can people get used to it? Even non-geeks? Sure. If an 8-year old child can do it, I would think a college student, regardless of their general computer competency, should be able to do it as well.
    • Nice story.


      I've been repeating myself about this for a couple of years now, but I could have predicted that your eight year old would take to it quicker than your fifteen year old. Any person who is given a set of SW to run and who is not in the habit of changing very much on the setup will happily adapt to Linux (or anything else for that matter). For such people (and there are a lot of them in businesses), what OS is run on the desktop will become a matter of cost and reliability. And we all know who will win in the x86 market.


      As a general rule, up until you reach the true geek category, the more sophisticated a user, the *more* difficulty they will have switching to Linux.

  • My university provides every single one of the 30000 students as well as faculty with a single logon that works on WinNT/2k, Mac, and Sun Sparc Stations.

    In fact, there are several Sparc stations in each lab and I use them for browsing and email while waiting for a windows machine for 3D Studio.

    They're pretty easy to use, and everything that a non-comp sci major would not need is not prominent. Email, Web Browsing, Text editing are all simple prominent buttons. Even changing your personal preferences, backgrounds, etc. is simple.

  • UNICAMP(Brazil) (Score:2, Informative)

    by k-s ( 162183 )
    Here in Brazil, our best Computer Science University uses Linux Red Hat (6.2,7.0 and 7.2) and Windows NT4 in labs. The servers are SunOS with NFS, YPserver, Samba, SSH and others. It runs well and almost 50% use Linux for non-programming things like surf the web, etc...

    They've recently changed the libraries machines OS from Windows to Linux (Autologin and Netscape). Most of people don't care (I think that was because the browser was always Netscape).

    Aside of that, If you want it to work fine and people use it, use something that will NOT SHOCK THEM, like KDE3, Gnome or IceWM(if you don't have a good computer) and pre-configure it in a cool way: a menu with things that matter first, desktop icons and some explanation of the basic programs(like mozilla, kmail, evolution, konqueror, galeon).
    If you have some processing power, get some cool theme, like Liquid for KDE3(the best), Acqua or Luna (looks like WinXP).

    I recommend you to introduce Evolution, Nautilus, Galeon, Kmail, Konqueror and Mozilla first, they're all easy to use.

    The server could handle it using NFS and ypserver.
  • A month or so back I had the unenviable joy of being stuck in Brighton Hospital for a while... Discovered they have machines advertising "www.pienetworks.com" in their cafe area, running Galeon, fvwm{2,95}, just one mouse button, C-A-f1 disabled... the works. Nice to see non-windoze OSs making it into public access terminals.

  • Linux is better than windows. It was designed for multiuser from the ground up. You log in, and you have access to your files, and only your files (with permissions you can modify this, but most lab users won't need to share files anyway). With windows you log in, and you get access to all locally stored programes and files. Want to mess up the comptuer, guess what, Windows give you the rope to hang everyone. Linux only gives root enough rope to hang everyone.

    If you have kids, then linux is all the more important. Adults will mostly just use the comptuer for what they want to do. kids will often do their best to destroy the computer. Linux gives you enough protection that kids generally can't destroy the comptuer (if they get good, then openBSD is an option)

    I remember high school. Kids all over doing their best to ruin the comptuer system. There was always someone wanting to do a format of whatever disk could be found. Always someone trying to delete critical applications.

    Windows is based on a trust model. Macs are the same (I've not worked with OSX though) Linux is assumes that you don't trust yourself. Linux is the only way to go for public machines.

  • MIT has started using RedHat-based Intel boxes for the public-access terminals (i.e. where people go to check mail and such). They still have a lot of old Suns and SGI boxes lying around, and such, but there are now quite a few Linux terminals, too. The user interface is consistent across architectures, and is nowadays built on GNOME.

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