Date: Tue, 28 Dec 2004 07:50:29 -0700 From: Jon Drews <jon.drews@gmail.com> To: freebsd-advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: How to deploy FreeBSD desktops ? Message-ID: <8cb27cbf04122806501424c274@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <20041228131916.GB10229@netmeister.org> References: <8cb27cbf04122708111005f3eb@mail.gmail.com> <20041228131916.GB10229@netmeister.org>
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Thanks so much Guys: I would also like to ask what was the reaction from the end users when they began using the FreeBSD desktops? I ask because I installed some NetBSD 1.6.2 desktops for students, at a small University center here. The NetBSD worked very well in my opinion. I had Gnuplot, Scilab and Gnumeric installed for the students, along with Firefox 1.0. I also got sound working on them and the NetBSD boxes can play mp3's, CD's or stream Ogg Vorbis (from Virgin Radio). However the students complained about having to log in, which I thought was odd. They don't use them much and are reluctant to learn the basic commands (startx, shutdown -h now etc. ). Also I did not install Xdm/Gdm and had them use "startx". I guess that was a big mistake. I did that because these computers are old (255 MHz PII - 400 MHz PIII) with about 150 Mb of ram on each. I wanted as much memory free as possible. I was using Xfce 4 and Gnome 2.8 as the desktops. A guy who is a sysadmin advised me to install Kde, so I did. However it took quite a while to compile so I only did it on one machine. Still the students were reluctant to use them. Truth be told I have not been able to meet with them that often. I did the installs as a volunteer project. I would think the NetBSD boxes would have appealed to them as I have some nice software installed on them. I also included, Gperiodic (periodic table of elements), Rasmol (molecular viewer) and GTK Chemtool (molecular drawing), for the chemistry and biology students. Where have I gone wrong and what should I do to entice the students to give them a try ? On Tue, 28 Dec 2004 08:19:16 -0500, Jan Schaumann <jschauma@netmeister.org> wrote: > Shamelessly plugging myself :-), I'd like to point out that I presented > a framework for just this at EuroBSDCon this year. Well, not FreeBSD > desktops, but NetBSD, but the underlying principle is obviously the > same. So you may find this paper helpful: > > http://www.netbsd.org/~jschauma/netbsd-desktop.pdf > http://www.netbsd.org/~jschauma/netbsd-desktop-slides.pdf Thanks so much Jan, I will be looking into these. Kind regards Jonathan
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