Regarding choice of the distribution

[Arun SAG]

Hi,

I am writing manual on package installation and package managers, i am assuming that the students will be using some latest version of Fedora. Is this ok?

--
Arun S.A.G
http://zer0c00l.in/

[விக்னேஷ் நந்த குமார் (Vignesh Nandha Kumar)]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Arun SAG <sag...@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi,

I am writing manual on package installation and package managers, i am assuming that the students will be using some latest version of Fedora. Is this ok?

As the FOSS lab that Mr.Baskar has setup in the colleges are all running Fedora 14/13, I think this should be ok.

But, IMHO, it would be nice if a basic intro about DEB packages is also included, rather than restricting it to RPM (Fedora) alone.


--
நன்றிகளுடன்,
விக்னேஷ்.
http://krvignesh.wordpress.com

[Vijay Kumar]

On Sunday 17 April 2011 11:54 AM, (Vignesh Nandha Kumar) wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 11:44 AM, Arun SAG<sag...@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am writing manual on package installation and package managers, i am
>> assuming that the students will be using some latest version of Fedora. Is
>> this ok?
>>
>
> As the FOSS lab that Mr.Baskar has setup in the colleges are all running
> Fedora 14/13, I think this should be ok.
>
> But, IMHO, it would be nice if a basic intro about DEB packages is also
> included, rather than restricting it to RPM (Fedora) alone.

Package management lab should be done inside a VM. The are lot of
advantages doing it this way.

1. Students need not be given root access.
2. Prevents accidental deletion of important packages. (like libc!)
3. Reduced administrative cost and overhead. (Results from 1 and 2)
4. Students always start the lab with a pristine copy of the VM's
hard disk image provided by us, so we know exactly what packages
are available and what are not. Makes things easy while writing
the manual.
5. Lab exercise could include both apt/yum and deb/rpm. We just
use the appropriate hard disk image.

Any recent Fedora version can be used. We just have to ensure that we
use the same version across all lab sessions involving Fedora. So that
our own maintenance overhead is reduced.

Regards,
Vijay

[Baskar Selvaraj]

Any recent Fedora version can be used. We just have to ensure that we

use the same version across all lab sessions involving Fedora. So that
our own maintenance overhead is reduced.

The lab setup would be mostly done using Fedora 14/13 with all the required packages for lab exercises and I think their won't be any maintenance overhead

Regards

S. Baskar
LinuXpert Systems

[Baskar Selvaraj]

Package management lab should be done inside a VM. The are lot of

advantages doing it this way.

There are many occasions were the students need root access during the lab practical

1. Kernel Compilation / Installation
2. package management
3. Installing and configuring Samba and CUPS
4. Setting up version control system using RCS/CVS/SVN
5. Setting up the Network interface etc.

In most of the above cases, the students might require root access. 

Doing everything inside VM's hard disk image won't be a good solution, as most of the PCs provided by the college has less than 1 GB of RAM.

I would like to suggest the following things which can simply the above process.

In Fedora 13/14 setting up a LTSP chroot-ing environment has become a lot easier these days.  Once the LTSP chroot'ed environment is setup, the students can be asked to chroot to the LTSP chroot'ed environment, and they can practice almost everything without touching the booted operating system and also without having any impact in performace overheads  (I have tested this several times in my fedora machine they work very well without disturbing the booted OS).

Also to be noted that, when setting up LTSP chroot-ed environment, we need not require  LTSP services like DHCP, TFTP, NFS, XDMCP/LDM etc,  as we need to create an chroot-ed environment using LTSP provided packages for doing the above.

All the above said practicals can be easily done within the chroot'ed environment.

Just my thoughts.

S. Baskar
LinuXpert Systems

[Arun SAG]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Baskar Selvaraj <bas...@linuxpert.in> wrote:

>Doing everything inside VM's hard disk image won't be a good solution, as most of the PCs provided by >the college has less than 1 GB of RAM.

If we strip down Fedora and remove the desktop environment  or make it boot in runlevel 3 1GB ram is well enough.

OTOH LTSP is a good solution too, but configuring it might be difficult for teachers/students.

[Vijay Kumar]

Baskar Selvaraj wrote:
> There are many occasions were the students need root access during the
> lab practical
>
> 1. Kernel Compilation / Installation
> 2. package management
> 3. Installing and configuring Samba and CUPS
> 4. Setting up version control system using RCS/CVS/SVN
> 5. Setting up the Network interface etc.

[clip]

> Doing everything inside VM's hard disk image won't be a good solution,
> as most of the PCs provided by the college has less than 1 GB of RAM.

A Debian base install boots with just 32MB of RAM, inside a VM. So RAM
shouldn't be a problem. I guess it should be possible to do something
similar with Fedora as well.

> I would like to suggest the following things which can simply the above
> process.
>
> In Fedora 13/14 setting up a LTSP chroot-ing environment has become a
> lot easier these days.

I do understand that package management can done inside a chroot env.
But I guess that does not solve the kernel installation, networking,
etc. or am I missing something?

Regards,
Vijay

[Baskar Selvaraj]

I do understand that package management can done inside a chroot env.
But I guess that does not solve the kernel installation, networking,
etc. or am I missing something?

True, kernel compilation/installation and networking can be done
from the booted OS.

Students can practice package installation inside chroot env. without disturbing the booted OS.

S. Baskar

[Baskar Selvaraj]

OTOH LTSP is a good solution too, but configuring it might be difficult for teachers/students.

In our FOSS Lab setup, LTSP related packages gets installed in all the individual clients.  Configuring LTSP for chroot-ing is just about making changes in two files

adding an entry for the distro being used

/etc/sysconfig/ltspdist

Fedora Repository URL for fetching the packages and building the LTSP chroot environment

/etc/ltsp/kickstart/Fedora/14/ltsp-i386.ks

Once the above is done, running ltsp-build-client automatically builds the chroot environment for Fedora (tried from Fedora-11 to 14 and works fine).

S. Baskar
LinuXpert Systems