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Dual Booting Linux & Windows is Not a Death Sentence!

NERCOMP March 7, 2005 aaron.bennett@olin.edu

fedora
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Dual Booting Linux & Windows is Not a Death Sentence!

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  1. NERCOMP March 7, 2005 aaron.bennett@olin.edu This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 559 Nathan Abbott Way, Stanford, California 94305, USA. Dual Booting Linux & Windows is Not a Death Sentence!

  2. Introduction About Olin College Mission: Olin College prepares future leaders through an innovative engineering education that bridges science and technology, enterprise, and society. Skilled in independent learning and the art of design, our graduates will seek opportunities and take initiative to make a positive difference in the world. Scholarship Policy: Every admitted student receives a four-year, full tuition scholarship valued at approximately $125,000 Official opening: Fall 2002 Current Enrollment: 219 Freshmen, Sophomores, and Juniors

  3. Olin Laptop Program All students required to buy the same model of Dell laptop Laptops are owned by students, but supported by IT All laptops have four year on-site service Loaners Help Desk uses Ghost to manage Windows install We had a curricular need for all students to have Linux

  4. Do It Yourself Before we had our Linux program Students install Linux on first day of class Disaster Disaster Disaster Disaster Disaster

  5. Decision Process First we just did it Then we gathered a working group

  6. Academic Requirements Python & several python modules GCC Java JDK Matlab Emacs General Linux Tools / Utilities Must be able to Read and Write Windows Fileshares

  7. Student Requirements 90/10 rule Multimedia must work Instant Messaging Ease-of-Use

  8. IT Requirements Low or No Cost Auto Installation Ease of Use Integration into Windows Active Directory ( we decided to postpone this one ) Supportability Automatic or painless deployments of security fixes Active user community compatible with Ghost – or at least, not incompatible

  9. General Objectives General-purpose, easy to use, build and install Primarily to support curriculum Usable by students with limited Linux experience Supportable by a small IT staff

  10. Possible Solutions – Debian and spin-offs Debian Stable Unstable http://www.debian.org Debian Spin-offs Knoppix, Linspire, Mepis, Xandros, Ubuntu

  11. Wild Card – Gentoo Linux Source Based Extremely Configurable Very Popular with Hacker/Geek crowd

  12. Red Hat Solutions Red Hat Enterprise Workstation http://www.redhat.com/solutions/industries/ education/products/ Education cost: $25 per copy or site license Fedora Core http://fedora.redhat.com Free

  13. Other RPM-Based solutions Mandrake http://www.mandrakesoft.com/ SuSe http://www.novell.com/Linux/suse/index.html

  14. Fedora Core Introduction Redhat is no longer producing a free, unsupported consumer-grade Linux distribution. The goal of The Fedora Project is to work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software. The Fedora Project anticipates new releases 2 or 3 times per year. Security updates are provided for older versions by Redhat for some time and then handled by the community-run Fedora Legacy project.

  15. Fedora Core Strengths of Fedora Core Price Community Support Predictable Release Cycle Leading Edge Components Reasonably High Release Quality RPM / Yum package system

  16. Fedora Core, continued Weakness of Fedora Core Rapid release cycle Release cycle is less predictable then we thought Distribution Bloat Lack of non-free packages Especially: MP3, Flash, Java “Enterprise-itus”

  17. Criteria for Decision Ultimately, any linux distribution can be made to work Any distribution will also require extensive tweaking The most important criteria are community support, availability of common software packages, and packaging system. I prefer RPM to other packaging systems Having elected to stick with RPM based systems, Fedora seemed logical Price Community Red Hat

  18. Olinux Overview Customized Fedora install: Different look Wireless roaming Full multimedia support Based on Fedora Core 2 Plan is to stay on FC2 until this summer and then develop an upgrade path to the latest, which should be FC 4.

  19. Multimedia Support Livna.org: MP3 Plugins Xvidcore, Xine, Mpeg Support Firefox: mplayer plugin, Acrobat Reader Plugin, Java Support, Real Player

  20. Wireless Stuff Ndiswrapper http://ndiswrapper.sf.net Wireless Roaming Waproamd Ifplugd Customized for Fedora and for Olin Wired / Wireless boot-time detection Use mii-tool to determine if a wired link is present

  21. Windows Access We considered making each laptop a native Active Directory Client via Samba / Winbind. Instead we just use local accounts I wrote a program “olinshares” which makes it easy to mount Windows shares without having to be root or learn the “mount” syntax All laptops have a small fat-32 partition

  22. Look and Feel • It sounds like a small thing, but theme can be the difference between a student liking Linux from the start and hating it.

  23. Olinux Look and Feel

  24. Infrastructure / Build Environment • Kickstart Server • Local mirrors • Build system • Custom Repository: yum or apt • Olinux: “meta package” that depends on other packages. • With FC 3 and above, you can use “yum group install” and define groups

  25. Problems / To Do ACPI support – power management is poor Cold Boot w/o AC problem More robust multi-media integration Ndiswrapper is fairly limited Yum / up2date need to handle kernel modules better Greater student involvement in the process Tap the wealth of Geek knowledge @ Olin Open the system to student contributions

  26. Resources Fedora Project – http://fedoraproject.org/ My website http://fsweb.olin.edu/~abennett Linux on Laptops contains a ton of information about getting linux to work on almost any imaginable laptop. http://www.linux-laptop.net Livna.org: The best source of non-free packages. This is where go to get MP3 support, etc added back into Fedora. http://rpm.livna.org Fedora Tracker is a fantastic resource that searches many different repositories. Perfect if you are looking for a specific package you can’t find anywhere else. http://www.fedoratracker.org

  27. Questions?

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