This penguin walks on a bed of blue screens of death!

[Lincoln Peters]

For those of you who don't know what I've been working on in my spare time 
for the past two months (or only have heard parts of it), I'll recap it.  
Otherwise, skip to paragraph 4.

When I heard that Rancho Cotate High School was to convert all of their new 
(?) computers to run Windows NT and revolve around an NT server, I was 
highly skeptical.  After about 100 blue screens of death in three months, 
one loses all faith in Microsoft products as being useful beyond 
rediculously simple tasks (e.g. Wordpad).  Before they had begun moving to 
Windows NT, all of the non-Macintosh computers were running Windows 98SE and 
a third-party security program that caused about 50 times as many random 
crashes as normal, and I cracked in about a minute using a generic rescue 
disk.  The Macintoshes were even worse.  They had a totally different 
third-party security program that screwed up countless systems (one iMac 
even refused to eject a floppy diskette), and I could have cracked it just 
as easily as the PC's if I had had a bootable Macintosh CD-ROM.

Before the last school year was out, there were already several Windows NT 
workstations around the school.  Some worked, and some didn't.  In fact, I 
had never heard our foreign exchange teacher from England use any swear 
words until he got one of those workstations!  Another teacher was so fed up 
with his NT workstation, he wiped the hard disk (using a Linux boot disk and 
"dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda") and installed Windows 95 on it!

I had no confidence that they would have the NT network in a usable state by 
September, so in August, I got to work on an alternative.  With a little 
help from Mike (okay, a lot of help) in regard to NFS, I set up a 486 
computer with two surplus SCSI harddrives, plus the original IDE hard drive, 
an NE2000 Network card, and the NFS service.  With a little additional 
effort to set up the workstation filesystem on the third harddrive, I had a 
working netbooting server by the first week of school.  Just boot off a 
floppy and it mounts its root filesystem from the server using NFS.  Okay, 
it took me a month to diagnose all of the hardware issues with the 
workstations, but it works pretty well now.


That is, it works pretty well for me, because I know what I'm doing.  I 
couldn't run GNOME or KDE on any of the workstations because they only have 
64MB of memory (aack!) and it is impossible to set up any sort of swap 
device when netbooting.  By default, it now runs FVWM2 when users log in, 
and the default configuration (at least it's the default in RedHat 7.1) will 
probably get a big "Huh?" from everyone who looks at it.  It took me 30 
seconds to figure out that I was supposed to click on the desktop to get any 
kind of a Start menu (there was nothing at all like a "Start" button), so it 
would probably take most people 30 minutes to figure it out.  I couldn't 
find any session manager that was any frendlier and that didn't overload 
that precious little 64MB of memory.  It's weird, though, because I remember 
that in RedHat 6.1, FVWM had a "start" button.

Even worse, the "Programs" section of the menu is empty!  I can't see any 
way that anyone besides myself would feel comfortable starting programs 
using an XTerm!  I guess I'm somewhat spoiled because Ximian GNOME runs on 
my home computer (it has 256MB of memory), so I have no experience with 
setting up FVWM2 or any other session manager besides KDE.  Can anyone clue 
me in on how configure it?

A few other minor issues exist, but I want to have _something_ that is 
actually usable for ordinary people before I tackle them.  If this seems 
daunting right now, I can't imagine what it'll be like when I try to port 
this to the iMacs!


(Some of you may remember that I was originally trying to use the server's 
root filesystem as the workstations' root filesystem.  When I tried that, I 
found that the necessary changes in the initscripts were so extensive and so 
weird that I finally said to myself, "Ah, ***** it," and got the third 
harddrive for the workstations' root filesystem.)

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