I might be out of line here but I would be wary of using any CODECs which are not explicitly, obviously free in a teaching environment. I would certainly steer clear of any "non-free" or otherwise CODECs unless I had permission from the patent holders to use them in that context.

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^ multimedia codecs in the united states is a tricky issue.

That is a very good point! Does anyone know how that is handled? The district already has around 15,000 windows devices out there. And they all have the all the codecs needed to play most things. I assume windows 7 has them included? Or possible VLC does?

Does anyone have any idea what the cost would be for that if it's needed?

i dont know about vlc specifically but linux-mint downloads page has a version specifically for the us with mp3 and mpeg codecs removed:
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

linux-mint is based in ireland outside the jurisdiction of the fbi.

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Linux Mint is Irish? I had no idea. I was looking on the VLC page in the legal section. They are based in France, apparently. So don't have to worry about any software patents.

I have emailed the district people responsible for this project to ask if they want a stand along video player. I don't think they do. But it would be better to be sure now. Rather than after I've imaged over 1000 of them and given them out. They have done that to us in the past.

At my college, they emphasized the usage of vlc (posting papers on the wall of clear instructions on using vlc).

They were all windows computers though. Does buying a windows license (or pc with windows license) imply the codecs are part of the amount you have to pay?
If that was true, it would seem that windows media player could play anything that vlc could. But as I recall, wmp is extremely limited at what it can play versus vlc which can play essentially anything (based on my last usage of wmp, 3-4 years ago

I believe ms, apple and google pay a yearly royalty to the mpaa for the benefit of their customers to use the mp3, mpeg and dvd decoders. (i'm checking online for an actual reference).

it's probably not cost productive for companies like redhat, novell, debian, ... to pay for the license since most of their customers don't have a need to listen to music on a headless server.

op: codecs like flac, ogg and containers like mkv are free for anyone to use.

From what I read on the VLC site. They use the ffmpeg libraries for codecs but also have their own muxer & demuxer. So I don't think they use a codec pack install in windows.

In windows XP I remember having to always find a codec pack online when I had to reinstall after I borked my system. I don't think they included much besides wmv and wma codecs with windows media player. I talked with the software guy at the district about it today. He said in Win7 there a media package you can download to get the proprietary codecs. And MS just pays for them.

I think the reason VLC can play more than wmp is that is uses ffmpeg. So it can play a lot of the more obscure and little know video files while the wmp could only play the more well know ones they payed a fee for. But I'm mostly guessing here. I don't know a whole lot about codecs and containers and whatnot.

Downloading the non-codec version of linux mint & then providing the free version of ffmpeg could be a good way to go.
It's pretty simple to compile ffmpeg

ffmpeg also includes a guide on ensuring compliance with licenses (I think it's meant for programs incorporating ffmpeg but w/e)

So the instructional technology people have gotten back to me. They do not need any video player. They will be using mediacast. It's like youtube but managed by the district. Teachers can upload videos there and student watch it via browser. So that makes the whole codec topic moot, thankfully.

Though they did say that are thinking about using Linux on some other machine. They are small form factor Atom based machine. They are used in libraries and labs. We are talking around 3000 computers here. And we can't just put the image on them and leave them be. They would have to be managed.



So what is a linux equivelent to Active Directory?

I saw in YAST an option to join a windows domain. Will that let them log in using their AD credentials the same way they do on windows machines?

What is the best way to manage them? Push updates and whatnot?

Or is this something I shouldn't do? Would I be getting in over my head trying to manage so many? Since I don't have much experience with linux at the enterprise level.

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i think all network administrators are in over their head... no real advice sorry but thanks for keeping us updated learning what barriers you face and methods to avoid and get around them is very interesting.

(most school districts arent very forthcoming with their computing infrastructure).

So possibly 4400 total linux computers to deal with?

I would say that yes, that's a lot to manage.

But if the commands you need to issue are identical, there are some interesting programs out there that may be of benefit. They would let you issue commands, copy files, etc to as many servers as needed.
I have no experience with it though.

In theory, if you can manage 5, you should be able to manage 3000 as long as the commands can be identical (with variables if needed). Same with the other 1000.
If they have to be managed individually, that'd be another story.

Hey all. Sorry for not posting in a while, the project was put off for a while and I got side tracked with life. But I figured some might be interested in how I got this working. And people in similar situations could get ideas and whatnot.


Short recap. The school district I work for wants me to put Linux on about 1,200 old netbooks and the library PCs in a few of the schools. I used openSUSE and went with saltstack for the management on the PCs. The netbooks will be mostly unmanaged, when they have problems we will just reimage them. And not worry about updates. Since it is just a way to make them usable until they buy new ones in a year or two.


For the netbooks I've got 3 schools done. So about 400 netbooks reimaged. It's been a slow process. Mostly due to the way they schedule me to work on them. In the evenings after school. I go to each classroom and gather them together to image/config them.

For the library PCs (small Mini-ITX boxes) I have done 5 schools, about 60 machines. That is all I will be doing for now. The library directory will wait a while and decide if they want to expand to all the elementary library computers. These are a lot easier to do. I got it to about 30 minutes per school, with each school having 12 machines. The image is on a flash drive and can be restored in under 4 minutes. Then I just run a simple script I wrote to set the hostname, minion_id, and enable/start salt. Then I can use salt to push the printers they need in about 2 minutes. Well pushing it only takes about 3 seconds, the rest is finding the printer name, server, PPD file, etc.

I LOVE LINUX! I remember doing this when we switched them to Windows 7. The libraries took about 4 hours! Sometimes a lot longer when there were network issues. And it was far more steps and far more annoying. Putting down the image alone took 45-70 minutes. Granted their image had far more software (mostly junk though) and we didn't have access to SCCM or any of the windows management tools. So had to do it manually on each machine.


So just wanted to let you all know how things are going with the project. And thank you for the input. It helped give me direction and things to look into. If you are curious about specifics I would be happy to go into them.

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