Hintonblogger

I finally figured out how to auto-boot an iMac as a Thin Client to Ubuntu. The Open Firmware commands are:

setenv boot-device enet:"ip of LTSP server",yaboot (without the quotes)

Now it auto boots as a thin client whenever it is started up, there's one more thing off my to figure out list.

I'm going to be giving a Poster Presentation at the WOW conference about Thin-Clients. It's a technology education has to be looking at considering what Web 2.0 allows to do using just a browser and the realities of budgetary constraints on education. Passing Bonds are not a reliable or stable funding source for technology. In order to really have a technology vision or plan it would be nice to get some stable funding sources that reflect the realities of what we need to teach the students.

Yes, I'm still alive. Though after a 2am work session for the San Tan Incorporation Committee website I am wondering. Today while setting up Greenfield Junior High for the upcoming school year, we ran into a problem of how to update thirty wireless laptops with the latest OS X updates (almost 235mb worth of stuff). There were 12 different updates with 5 or 6 separate updates that required restarts.

A colleague of mine and myself found a program called, Iceberg, that allows the user to create a metapackage - a collection of packages. Iceberg allowed us to group sets of updates together, minimizing the restart time and baby-sitting of the update process. While it took a little while to learn the program and then troubleshoot the correct sequence of updates, I think it was well worth the time spent. Once we got the twelve updates narrowed down to two metapackages, we were able to quickly distribute those packages via firewire hard drives and the update process was completed an hour and a half later.