New York City, New York, 9/23/98:

LXNY, the Free Software Users Group in New York City, held a meeting at The Urban Peace Academy, a New York City High School. The mission: to get Linux running somewhere in the brand new 34 seat/NT server Pentium computer lab.

It's hard to believe, but neither the school's staff nor the principal, are entrusted with sufficient privledges on the system to enable students to delete documents. Students and staff may only open, create or save files. All of the computers are physically locked down to prevent theft and the principal does not even have a key. Furthermore, the machines are set up to not recognize any system disks in the floppy or cd-rom drives.

This situation is typical in New York's public schools. Brand new Windows-based computer labs are built with no budget assigned for ongoing maintenance. Instead, a single company has the exclusive contract to perform all maintenance and system upgrades in all five boroughs of New York. When administration is needed, the company must be called and it replies as soon as it can. Of course, the response time is unacceptably slow.

With the principal of the high school at our side, the BIOS was modified on a student work station and a SuSE Linux distribution installed. The NT server was left in place as this was felt to be politically wise for the time being. The school labs are comprised of Dell optiplex machines and it was learned that the SuSE distribution was better for these machines. Indeed, SuSE had no problem with the Dell box. The SuSE distribution came with the Apple networking package as well as Samba, the Windows networking package. Of course it also comes with full TCP/IP and a Novell client. These packages allow Linux to replace the NT server, thus giving the local staff control of the services.

The person in charge of lab operations learned how to log in and create user accounts. He now has a root password, thus giving Urban Peace Academy back a measure of control over their computers. A demo of various X windows tools and desktops was performed as well.

LXNY is currently supporting the school's staff with email and phone tech support and with training & support visits by experienced system administrators during school hours.

This is the third school that LXNY has helped. Anyone can help by joining LXNY's school support mailing list. Send mail to Majordomo@lrw.net and include the phrase subscribe lxk12 in the body of your message.

LXNY is an organization in support of the Free Software Movement, that welcomes all supporters of free software, whether or not you run, or even like, the Linux kernel, or anything from Project GNU, or indeed any particular individual piece of free software at all.

LXNY is an educational organization, a charitable trust, a human nexus, and an eating and drinking club. Most LXNY get togethers take place in New York City. Our chief objective is the spread of superior methods of operation of computers. Often the second step in the rehabilitation of a home or office small machine, or net of machines, is the installation of a free operating system. The first step is almost always the realization that there is a better way. LXNY is of help at both the first and the second steps.

LXNY was founded by Bob Young in April of 1994. Bob was the head of LXNY until he resigned in October of 1996 to devote himself fulltime to his duties as President of Red Hat Software, Inc., his present position.

Special Thanks to Randy Wright for most of this copy and his technical prowess on that day.

Jim Gleason
jgleason@electriclichen.com Electric Lichen L.L.C.