Here are a few photos of NABB's library, before and after. Before the conversion, the room was mainly used for storage and eventually became a dumping ground for all the items the teachers no longer required in the classrooms.
Space is at a premium in Holmfirth J I & N School, it was therefore essential that whatever furniture was fitted accommodated as much as possible.
Before
This was the NABB's library back in April 2007.
After
In August 2007 it was complete.
There are 17 thin clients housed in the room. The Promethean ActivBoard is connected to a Windows XP machine in a server cabinet 15m away. The USB leads use repeaters so no data is lost. A standard USB connection can be no longer that 7-10m before a repeater is required.
Each HP 5725 thin client is mounted to the bottom of the furniture using HP's quick release bracket. This provides quick and easy access to all the cables & means that a client is very quick to swap.
Nabb saw it's first small influx of Year 5 children using the the Ubuntu thin clients. They were very impressed.
There were 6 children in all, I told them how to log in to the machines and then left them to explore! They were engrossed by what it had to offer. Given free reign, they obviously went straight for the games. They loved the variety that Ubuntu had to offer and word quickly spread when one of the children found snake.
In an effort to explore their creative potential, I pointed them in the direction of Tux Paint, a basic but feature rich paint program primarily for KS1 & 2 children. I showed them how to use the stamp feature (readily created images) and they were engaged until break time.
A screenshot of Tux Paint.
They wanted to remain in the library through break time, so I let them, encouraging them all to experiment with the applications offered by Ubuntu. Experimentation will never become a problem with the thin client system and I can remain confident that I'll never 'fix' anything again, as administrative tasks are locked down by default.
In contrast, I've just spent two days locking down Windows Server 2003 whilst effectively allowing all our pupils and staff access to their own personal XP environment! Each user now has their own username and password, therefore allowing access to their own personal My Documents. They also have the ability to customise applications and the desktop the way they want. Personalisation is something all kids love - take ring tones and wallpaper on mobile phones for example!
One of the thin clients arrived yesterday (HP). It came with a mouse, keyboard and all necessary cables. The instructions were very basic, but so is the thin client itself. It was brand new and took 5 minutes to setup. I was impressed by the small size and it looked very smart. I would have to do further research to see how it attaches to the monitor.
I turned it on and it instantly booted up, without having to be connected to a server. It came with a small cut down version of the O/S and was very easy to navigate and configure. Quite impressive.
The next step is getting it talking with the server. If I was to use PXE then the built in Linux, I believe, would become redundant. This is the way I intend to approach it though. I'm eager to know how fast it is using LTSP.
I setup the school's hosting account yesterday also. We setup a domain name http://www.nabbschool.co.uk so that all the schools resources can easily be accessed. I will move the school's forum to the hosting account before it grows in size. This will probably have to be done using cut and paste as createforum will probably not allow export, it would go against their best interests. This would get rid of the adverts and simplify things by tighter integration into NABB. PhpBB maintains itself, so this should not be an issue.
PhpBB
http://www.phpbb.com
Today proved successful for Holmfirth. We managed to get the opportunity to evaluate three different models of thin clients, the HP t5125 the IGEL 2110 and IGEL 3210. I look forward to setting up our first mini thin client network.
I was advised by a friendly woman from Thin Store which model would better suit our needs.
My first requirement was the size, it had to fit on the back of a monitor. My second was its ability to boot from the network - this feature was called PXE. My final requirement was it's cost.
I was recommended the 3 models and was told they would all fit on the back of a monitor, although size is not too important at this stage.
Our aim would be to scale down in size as much as possible given a budget of between £100 - £200. An overall budget of £250 - £350 per machine would be realistic given the price of monitor, keyboard, mouse and cables. 4 computers could be purchased for £1000, this price will only decrease given time. At this stage I'd like to experiment with LTSP. I've looked into using an open source operating system called Ubuntu Linux, this has a tremendous amount of support and is of course without any added license fees.
I've previously installed Ubuntu Server on a Pentium 4, 1GB Ram PC @ nabb. As yet I have not setup LTSP. I have recently discovered that the server version of Ubuntu is unnecessary so have installed Ubuntu as well in a dual boot fashion. This can later be amended.
Now I look forward to reading through various resources to get the system working and start experimenting. Information on setting such a system up is available given google keywords 'ubuntu' and 'ltsp'
Thin client models
HP t5125
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/12454-12454-321959-338927-89307-472257.html
IGEL 2110
http://www.igel.com/igel_rubrik/powerslave,id,52,nodeid,52,p,0,_language,en.html
IGEL 3210
http://www.igel.com/igel_rubrik/powerslave,id,53,nodeid,53,p,0,_language,en.html
Thin client sales
http://www.thinstore.net/
PXE
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preboot_Execution_Environment
LTSP
http://www.ltsp.org
Ubuntu Linux
http://www.ubuntu.com